Comment by einpoklum

> Then, the informed users can vote with their feet.

That's the thing, that it is quite difficult to vote with your feet. You can't remove systemd from your distribution in favor of separate independent facilities: The combination of its design, its gradual expansion, and the way some higher-level packages depend on it (especially GNOME) - typically prevent its removal.

So, you would need to switch distributions, which most users are not very inclined to do. And - even then, you look around, and you see that the big basic distros: RedHat/Fedora, Debian (and Ubuntu), Arch - use systemd. So almost all of the distributions based on them are also not an option if you want to avoid systemd.

... and the bottom line is that users will effectively not vote with their feet. And neither will system administrators, or whoever maintains OS images at organizations, because it's difficult for them to tell their superiors they want to switch everyone to, say, Slackware, or Devuan.