I'd have had more respect for systemd if it truly were crowned because people liked it rather than because of a ~7 person vote.
It didn't do socket based activation at all. It didn't handle day 2 operations well (if you changed the configuration of some parent service and the children needed to be restarted, this was just as manual as sysvinit but with a clunkier format). overrides were terrible. Failing out on a depchain was problematic.
The debian politics never would have gotten there if Lennart (and others) didn't decide that it was easier/better to start from a clean slate instead of upstart's weird middleground of a "script" verb to kinda sort make transitioning from sysvinit scripts easier, but not a wholesale reconception of what an init system needed to be in 2015 or whatever year that was.
systemd was, in a sense, crowned because Redhat also tried upstart and had to suck lemons for an entire release/support cycle, wrote something better, and Debian followed on. Not because Redhat/others didn't try to make it work, or because of 7 people.
Pretty sure it did actually.
>upstart's weird middleground of a "script" verb
What middleground? Upstart files werent scripts like sysvvinit they were declarative just like systemd.
I can see why red hat dumped it - they were clearly keen on "owning" PID 1 and would prefer not to depend upon ubuntus project.
It's the 7/8 person debian vote (split 50/50 and swung by one vote) that I found mystifying. It not only crowned a worse designed project burdened with a massive case of feature creep, that was weirdly unresponsive to bugs it killed off its competition.