I don’t think systemd is the epitome of technological evolution, but that’s another rant. The fact that it’s not just another init system is at the center of it, though.
Because it’s not, any distro that chooses to use it is, in fact, adopting a whole ecosystem. Some apps that predate systemd are even hard-depending on it for… reasons. Can you use GNOME without it? Why most distros adopted it as default instead of an alternative i can only speculate. At least Slackware hasn’t adopted it so far and Gentoo took, to me, the sanest approach: you can choose your init system, including systemd if you so prefer.
Devuan is the response to Debian choosing systemd. It’s its raison d’être, to be Debian without systemd.
I was unaware of Kicksecure, who their founder is and when they decided to adopt systemd, so i may be at fault here.
With this i agree:
It’s troublesome if distros and/or DEs rely so heavily on systemd to do their bidding. So much so, that some combinations of distro + DE don’t allow any differentiation in init or make it very cumbersome and unwieldy at best.
With this, i don’t:
systemd has become so good that even opponents can’t deny its merits and continue to make use of it
And this is where i think you’ve contradicted yourself. IMO, the only reason opponents use it is not because it’s so great but because it’s so entrenched in whichever distro they’re using.