Udev existed for nearly a decade on its own before it was merged with systemd. And upon that merger, Sievers, the then maintainer of udev and a close buddy of P

Udev existed for nearly a decade on its own before it was merged with systemd. And upon that merger, Sievers, the then maintainer of udev and a close buddy of Poettering, promised that udev would still be usable without systemd. But since then every time the topic comes up, the systemd devs (Poettering and Sievers in particular) as gone back on that promise.