I would be very surprised if it's a coincidence that Systemd's as difficult to avoid, if you're building a Linux distro, as it now is, nor a coincidence that it

I would be very surprised if it's a coincidence that Systemd's as difficult to avoid, if you're building a Linux distro, as it now is, nor a coincidence that it's been going NIH all over the rest of the system ever since Gnome was leveraged to speed up its adoption. The point is to make it difficult to offer a credible enterprise Linux distro that's not full of Red Hat-steered software in key places, turning you into a cheap knock-off of Red Hat with little say in what happens to the software you're providing, in terms of future development. It now costs a lot more money to get out of Red Hat's shadow & control, as a would-be Red Hat competitor—they're not just another distro among many, they run the damn show.