Were these other systems willing to pick up the slack in maintaining consolekit or coming up with their own solution? Didn't look like it. What about udev? Why did systemd devs have to pick the slack on that too?

Is is perhaps because the other init systems are only willing to touch a very narrow definition of init while depending on rotten, unmaintained pieces of the ecosystem like consolekit without being able/willing to maintain it themselves?

Or perhaps the plan is to let systemd folks do that while shitting on it so we can cook up a 600 LoC 'minimal init' while outsourcing a whole lot to systemd maintainers while taunting our minimalism?