Yes but as a somewhat layperson (electronics engineer and light firmware design, and some hobby sysadmin stuff), I can learn systemd's "language" in 30 minutes and most attributes are so self evident that you can puzzle them together without learning the language at all.

That Shepherd mess I would have no idea what to change to make a small tweak without spending hours and hours learning it because it is written extremely cryptically in comparison.

It's the difference between modifying a config with human readable names and having to go into the source code to change heavily abbreviated variables that require a lot of background knowledge to even read.