One existing technology Red Hat leveraged to achieve this was Gnome. A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to cr

One existing technology Red Hat leveraged to achieve this was Gnome. A few years ago, the Gnome developers (many of whom were employed by Red Hat) decided to create a hard dependency on logind which was part of systemd. Other distros were mollified by being told that logind didn't really depend on systemd and they could just take it out and use it. Then, once that was safely ensconsed, Poettering declared that actually using logind without systemd wasn't supported, they shouldn't have done it, and he was going to completely break it. All the desktop distros were forced to abandon their own init systems and switch to systemd, with all the headaches and bugs that entailed. Another technology they're using is to some extent the Linux kernel itself. The API used to create device nodes when drivers are loaded is undocumented and the only supported way to use it is udev; anyone else can expect to have their code broken by new kernel releases. That, in turn, is now part of systemd and using it outside of systemd is no longer supported. In effect, the only supported way of using the Linux kernel is with systemd and anyone else is on their own dealing with undocumented, backwards-incompatible changes that the developers have no interest in helping them with.