Digimer writes:
SysV Init had to be replaced, it was terrible. Canonical didn't
make a
viable alternative, and no other projects were out there with any real
viability. So they funded the creation and development of systemd and
enough people liked it that it got picked up and hit critical mass.
Unfortunately, if systemd was just a sysvinit replacement, I don't think
most people would mind.
They never forced it on anyone.
Until Gnome acquired a dependency on systemd. At that point, if you wished
to ship Gnome, without hacking it, you'd have to ship systemd.