>And why wouldn't you compare it with the systems it actually competes against and replaces rather than against something that was barely used any more before systemd even stated development?

I would say that's a meaningless comparison and those other systems were never considered as real replacements. At that time I don't remember OpenRC getting any traction outside of Gentoo, and the distros using Upstart were already unhappy with it. Adding to that, systemd explicitly was targeting distros that used a lot of sysvinit scripts and was intended to be used as an upgrade for them. It's largely succeeded at that.