Logging boot messages to the console with SystemD and Digital Ocean

The problem

I recently ran into a situation where my boot times had gone through the roof. It was taking 6 seconds to boot through the kernel and nearly 3 minutes to boot through the userspace modules. Unfortunately, upon inspecting the log, it was unclear as to what exactly what was causing the delays, as the seconds were not being recorded, and since it was the usersapce modules taking a long time, the boot console wasn’t letting me see visually what was taking so long.