I'm sorry, but are we still going on about this? I love a good debate as much as the next guy, but being able to just have one interface (systemd's) for all services and having a more-or-less consistent language really helps.
At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.
You could also just use one system (Windows) for everything if you wanted. Some of us decided to use Linux because we want things to work how we want and not how some bigshot decides they should work.
Yeah and you can choose to use a 32 bit system, choose to delete half your kernel, and various cool things, none of which need to be SUPPORTED by others. There's nothing that should say that a maintainer must take into consideration every possible choice the user might make, and then support it.
If you truly want things to work the way you want, you should develop your own OS.
But if you are using software that other people provided to you for free, I think the developers also get a say in how things work. And in case you didn't notice, most open source licenses will tell you that they don't provide any kind of warranty.
It's Linux bro, we absolutely need to have 500 different options for every single thing. Doesn't matter if every option sucks, diversity is above everything! /s
There are some truly special people among Linux users that think diversity in init systems/libc implementations/etc is a good thing for a general-purpose desktop. They don't understand that people just want stuff to work, and developers don't want to support more than 1 init system (or other trivial thing) for their package.
Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that.
At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.