> Aren’t those social aspects part of their merits? A big part of why systemd won widespread adoption was by stepping up – the number of people working on the others wasn’t enough to be more competitive.

They had the people because they had the money. The debate about systemd is only partly technical; it's mostly a culture war about how Red Hat is hostilely taking over the free software ecosystem, and how that invokes memories of embrace/extend/extinguish.