Would have they remove the "systemd-" prefix from all side binaries and marketted them as independant projects on the website, made them usable without systemd and maybe on sub repositories, would have the systemd project just had to explain "yes we rewrite ntp, dns, etc, why not ?"
Instead they received complains about a "bloat ware" while often rewrites of industry-standard by unknown/junior people are acclaimed on HN :)
Even better, they could have integrated chronyd or others by creating "systemd integration standards" and submitting patches to these projects to gain community support and permit an easy switch to one or another implementation and let the users chose. Though it s still already easy to use something else than timesyncd on centos at least, thanks to systemd project and distri maintainers too :)