Don't want to troll or anything, just a question from curiosity: don't you think that massive popularity of systemd is a result of a massive demand for software like systemd?
(note that with functionality here i do not refer to specific APIs or interfaces, but higher level functionality like "i want to be able to do XXX when YYY happens")
On the server-side where Linux has its mainstay, using systemd is even more pointless IMHO since services and network interfaces don't come and go. Loosing portability for saving a couple lines of shell code for starting/stopping services is IMHO a trade-off that just doesn't make sense from an engineering PoV. All the more so since systemd doesn't shield you from the intricacies of dealing with demon programs; if something is going south on your server, have fun with systemd binary logs to analyze what has happened.
Now RedHat (who are shouldering a large part of Linux development anyway) sure aren't stupid; therefore I have to conclude that they're playing the Embrace, Extend, Extinguish game here to subvert Linux into SystemD-OS.
Devuan has become a very important key project to prevent that from happening to the Debian code base. Btw congrats to the Devuan project! I wasn't quite sure they'd be able to deliver a couple years ago when they started; now I think Devuan (along with Gentoo, Slackware, Alpine) is going to save Linux' ass as a "real" F/OSS community effort going forward, no less. My hope is Arch Linux with its great community and documentation gets a systemd-less fork as well.
All the rest have to grin and bear it until Pottering and crew gets bored, run into those corner cases that made the older systems so gnarly to maintain, and move on.
End result seems to be that quite a few either single or dual boot Linux on Mac.
Ask your average Windows user.