Pretty much. Originally, the Gnome developers told the distros that it wasn't a big deal because logind would run just fine with whatever init system they chose

Pretty much. Originally, the Gnome developers told the distros that it wasn't a big deal because logind would run just fine with whatever init system they chose to use. The a few years later once this was deeply embedded in everything Poettering declared that this was never supported, the distros shouldn't have done it, and it would break in the imminent future. The major distros all switched in the next release whether they wanted to or not.