Says right there, Don't panic...
Kind of makes sense?

That assumes Linux is the only game in town. If one is going to learn something new, there are two options: stay with Linux and learn the new way or switch to something else and learn a new way. The decision will be based on personal preferences and either is fine, but it is incorrect that people must use systemd because it is now the Linux "de facto."

If you don't want systemd on your machine, either find a distro without it, or go over to BSD, the original unix like O/S.

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Many distributions still forego systemd, mostly because they like to do things their way, not the upstream way.

My advice, try both. Devuan and Debian both in dual boot.

Besides, sooner or later we won't even need any part of systemd, including udev. ConsoleKit2, LoginKit, and Jude C. Nelson's vdev, aim to replace fairly much everything. The rest was replaced by service supervision toolkits like s6, perp, and Runit. The day udev is replaced, systemd will be less than useless.

systemd isn't the de-facto standard by any means. The true de-facto standard in system init is actually bash. Booting via /bin/bash is the true de-facto standard. Init systems only supercede it by adding service startup, shutdown, and monitoring scripts and service handlers. If you go old-school with GNU/Linux, even on a modern system, you're in for a very hands on approach to your system and resource management that nobody wants or likes to do, but can be done, and if you're a real knowledgeable system admin, can be done extremely well, almost unnoticed on a fully booted system. Though I doubt many people actually can do this any more due to lack of skill.