On the one hand you have the traditional server/sysadmin thinking about uptime and stability.
On the other hand you have the desktop/web thinking of rebooting often (or shutting down when not used, starting up before using) and being on the bleeding edge.
Another thing is that his mention about standard ways of doing something. I think that was why Freedesktop was set up in the first place.
But they seem to have gone massively off the rails almost from the outset, or it was simply too dominated by Gnome/Red Hat people (it was after all founded by once such person, Havoc Pennington) to really get things properly generic and modularized.
Asi write this i get to thinking about politics and thinktanks, and how they can make political decisions seem like they are scientifically based, when they really are rubberstamping preconceived political notions.
Similarly it may well be that Freedesktop exist to rubberstamp Red Hat/Gnome notions about Linux, by virtue of appearing to be a independent entity (similarly Gnome has its own foundation, but a large segment of its core developers are under Red Hat employ).
BTW, i seem to recall that while the BSD people had implemented most of the systemd APIs for various settings changes, they had run into a problem with logind.
Probably because logind depends heavily on PAM to get its job done, and PAM seems to fly in the face of basic unix-isms.