"exploring alternatives" absolutely means dropping support for sysvinit in many cases, which is what was already happening. Maintainers were failing to fix bug

"exploring alternatives" absolutely means dropping support for sysvinit in many cases, which is what was already happening. Maintainers were failing to fix bugs in their init scripts, or even ship init scripts for critical services. The resolution was about trying to force them to include a very small shell script to do the job, and they balked. There are a frightening number of maintainers who couldn't write a bash script to save their job, and even more maintainers who don't actually use or understand the package they are responsible for. I suspect the long term damage here is going to be embedded and all the little projects that base off Debian.