I think systemd was developed to make a libre replacement for SMF, that supported socket-based activation and deterministic boot. Those were two of the project'

I think systemd was developed to make a libre replacement for SMF, that supported socket-based activation and deterministic boot. Those were two of the project's original goals, but the endgoal I think was to develop this capability for open source Red Hat, SuSE and friends, get it on every distro, then use their influence at lower levels of the stack -- only one higher than the kernel itself! -- to have effective control over the open source ecosystem at a low level. Poettering worked for Red Hat during the development of both PulseAudio and systemd. If he was not writing code they wanted, he would have worked on another project. Ergo, one can conclude those projects to be Red Hat-oriented, or sponsored at minimum. I firmly believe the profit motive in the software world is what leads to dark patterns, user-hostile design, and other maladies we face in the modern software world. Their obligation to seek profit over all other things leads to compromised values, leading to compromised software.