It's quite simple: many people had atrocious experiences with systemd. Systemd ruined Debian for me, for example. I'd been using Debian testing for years and

It's quite simple: many people had atrocious experiences with systemd. Systemd ruined Debian for me, for example. I'd been using Debian testing for years and years, on multiple systems. Despite its name, I'd always found Debian testing to be more reliable than the stable releases of other major distros. When performing updates and upgrades during those many years of using Debian testing, I had only ever experienced trivial issues that I could easily resolve, usually just on my own with a few minutes of investigation. Then systemd was forced onto Debian's users. As soon as it ended up on one of my systems, the problems started. That very first update left my computer unable to boot. That was the first time in over a decade of using Debian that that'd happened. I also remember it taking far too long to diagnose and resolve whatever that initial problem was. Subsequent updates involving systemd just caused me more and more problems. They usually weren't minor issues, either. They'd significantly impact the usability of my installation. To make matters worse, I, as a user, didn't see systemd even bringing me any benefits. Eventually, I lost my ability to trust in Debian and its reliability, even for Debian stable once systemd eventually made it there. Now I completely avoid Debian and other systemd-using Linux distros whenever I can.