I’m not interested in another argument but calling my position “pitchforks” is a bit disengenuous and irritating (which is why I’m replying, off-topic, to you).
While I think it has something to offer I would like potentially better alternatives to be able to exist in future, this is not “pitchforks”.
systemd is the choice of basically everyone who builds distros, so of course it's going to be hard to avoid unless you volunteer to do all of that work yourself. When you take work from someone else, that comes with taking on the choices that they make.
What you state is absolutely true, but denying there’s more nuance is not helpful. That’s all I’ll say because this is not a worthwhile conversation to have here.
Even if we ignore the fact that systemd made it artificially difficult* for distros to support other init systems (so it wasn't a freely made "choice"), have you never encountered a situation where the popular choice turned out to be the wrong one? Think, for example, of people throwing their trash into nearby rivers, or developers using 2 digits to store year values.
(* Imagine being a volunteer for a distro and having to deal with bugs like "I installed my new printer and it changed my init system[0] / my system no longer boots").
[0] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=863974