sytemd's timers are for people that somehow never heard of cronjobs, which contrary to systemd's approach of reinventing the wheel, (badly) actually have sort of a standardized way of how to do them between them and are in some cases even transferable between the different daemons that exist. Personally I use fcron with runit, which also doesn't expect my computer to be running all the time to work properly. You have to be an absolute brainlet to not be able to wrap your mind around crontabs, especially with the sheer amount of documentation that's out there.
The funny thing about systemd is that one of the reasons it was claimed to be written for (quicker startup, as if that even fucking matters in any way) it doesn't really fulfill anymore, there are much simpler init systems that are a lot faster in booting and shutting down. It's literally not better at anything, you just have to learn the ass-backwards way the scripting of systemd works which is knowledge that isn't even transferable onto anything else as it only applies to systemd and also might be outdated and pointless any release as the devs of systemd don't deem it necessary to stay backwards compatible.
On top of that, it has a bunch of shit added to it in some flurry of developer ADHD that plain should not be in an init system. Shit that's interestingly also not easily removable, seemingly on purpose. The last one reeks of politics and Red Hat shenanigans, especially observing how aggressively systemd was marketed (I'm aware it's free but it's so aggressively shilled that it reminds of the strategies of the likes of Microsoft in the 90s) and how aggressively it's incompatible on purpose with stuff or doesn't let other projects use parts of it without pulling the whole blob in. That's where the conspiracy theories come in. I think it's much more mundane than that and Red Hat simply made a push to control the Linux userspace and wants to turn it into an unmanageable mess like Windows is to secure support jobs.
Re: The parallel start and deaemon dependency meme: This interdependency programming in inits so that daemons don't fail when specific conditions are not met is solving the problem from the wrong direction. A well written daemon acts gracefully if the resources it needs are not available (yet) and I am personally not aware of a single one that's so garbage that it doesn't. Even OpenVPN patiently waits and retries until a network connection is available. If you find one, you better should seek an alternative instead of writing a mess of an init system around it, or bug the developers and ask them why their daemon is garbage.
Even most normie and pajeet computer janitors seem to start to realize that systemd is kinda garbage but they have now invested time in it and inertia is big in IT, so I guess we'll be stuck for it for a while, no matter how much more garbage it becomes.