> I believe that Red Hat employees were some of the main contributors to Gnome, which quickly made systemd a hard requirement, forcing distros which used it as the default desktop to make systemd the default init system.

Yet another person writing fantasy, not facts. Systemd wasn't "quickly" made a hard dependency. It was a soft dependency for ages, then eventually the release team made a mistake around systemd-logind. I was part of the GNOME release team at that time. Still, GNOME runs without systemd. Meanwhile we had loads of discussions with loads of distributions.

Yet the things you write: quickly done, apparently lots of people were secretly paid by Red Hat, forcing distributions? All devoid of any facts, just emotions that dismiss the amount of work me and loads of volunteers have done.

How about the two democratic votes in favor of debian made in a system that is more democratic than real world voting? Or that Arch independently made the switch?

It's not a hard requirement, GNOME still runs on the BSDs.