Do I hate systemd now?

No, because that’s not specific to systemd.

I can quite clearly remember the long shutdown times back when Ubuntu was still using Upstart.

Generally speaking, long shutdown times are an indication of a system issue (e.g. HDD going bad or slow network) or just scripts being written poorly, and could be worked around by changing the timeout value. Systemd defaults to 90 seconds, but you can change that to 30 secs or lower.

Heads up that you can hit [escape] key while booting or shutting down in order to see the console and tell what the computer is actually doing.

I mean. You can fix those with a bit of effort.