I'll be contrarian: It's actually a solution to a whole host of problems that a stock Unix (Linux, *BSD, Solaris, ...) install does not solve. For example: Secure the content of the user's data while they are not logged in by encrypting it. Or make it possible for a user to take their home directory with them to a different machine. Or make it accessible from multiple machines. And it centralizes /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow into a single file (also a good thing).
And it also creates a huge host of problems. How do you deal with multiple users being in a group, and having permission to read (or even write) each others files? Even when the other guy is not logged in? How do you backup a home directory, if it is encrypted much of the time? How do you deal with loss of the key server that's inherent in using LUKS (great new DoS attack and failure mode)? When a user moves their home directory from one place to another, how do you prevent inconsistent changes in the two different places? That's a problem that neither Coda nor AFS were ever able to solve.
And for each of the problems that this solves, there are already better solutions. Encrypting file systems, and encrypting disk hardware. Shared and cluster file systems, for data portability (with correct semantics for parallel access). Authentication management systems that solve the bifurcation between /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, and so on and so on.
And in a tightly managed corporate environment, this whole thing just doesn't work. If an engineer in a big corporation takes his whole home directory and puts it on a USB stick, they will probably be fired on the spot, for violating a security policy. Long before they have time to plug that USB stick into a second computer. This while thing is one out-of-control software engineer trying to solve his little personal problem and his personal beef with systems, without thinking things through.
By the way, I love this completely ludicrous statement from the techrepublic article:
Prior to systemd every system and resource was managed by its own tool, which was clumsy and inefficient. Now? Controlling and managing systems on Linux is incredibly easy.
Nonsense. It is exactly as hard as it was before. The only thing that systemd has accomplished is to move things around. Everything is in a different place, and has a different name. Certainly things are more centralized ... but before they also had naming conventions. A lot more configuring and administering is done by commands, rather than by editing config files; that is cosmetics, which doesn't change the fact that they still need to be configured and administered. And more importantly, the configuration and administration still needs to be thought through, which is the hard task.
There are other gems in the techrepublic article which demonstrate that the author has no clue (like: putting the /home directories on a different partition or disk drive for data durability? when the OS self-destructs? thats's ridiculous).