If you can’t remember or don’t know the syntax well you can still understand a systemd timer, but that is much hard for the crontab.

I will agree that it is easier to read a timer than a Cron entry, especially if you've seen neither of them before.

Granted, crontab uses fewer characters, but if you only set up either once in a blue moon you’ll need the docs to write either for a long time.

This is where I disagree. I very rarely setup a Cron job, but when I do, I don't need to look anywhere for docs. I run crontab -e and the first line of the editor contains a comment which annotates each column of the Cron entry (minute, hour, dom, mon, dow). All that's left is to put in the matching expressions, and paste my command.

Compare that to creating a new timer, where I need to Google a template .service and .timer file, and then figure out what to put in what fields from the docs. That's probably available in the manual pages, but I don't know which one. It's just not worth it unless I need the extra power from systemd.

This is from somebody who has several systemd timers and also a few Cron jobs. I'm not a hater, just a person choosing the best and easiest choice for the job.