Well then do what Poettering did and write it.
It's threads like this why I am eternally grateful that Linux kernel uses a merit driven approach and not concessus driven one.
This is such a superficial and ignorant take I'm having hard time forcing myself to believe it was written in good faith.
Dozens of alternatives already exist. The problem isn't writing, problem is having politicial power Poettering had. (ie. He was employed by Red Hat and had close connections with other Freedesktop developers.)
Edit: If those other developers were really serious about trying to replace systemd they would be going around to every distro maintainer they can possibly find and asking them what systemd is doing badly and what they'd like to see in a better project. Then they'd have to think really hard about whether it's easier to fix those issues just by contributing to systemd, or whether a full replacement is warranted. Every now and then I see comments about writing replacements in Golang or Rust or some other memory safe language but there's no other interesting ideas there to warrant a rewrite. Maybe you do all this and conclude there are no major complaints from the big systemd users, and that's just how it is.
You end up needing to fork all the projects that Redhat has gotten their tentacles around.
It was killed because of the Red Had power behind Systemd.
Technically, I don't know which one is better, but politically, Systemd was a power move by Red Hat.
That is an absurd, untrue conspiracy theory. Whoever told you that should be ashamed. The author of Upstart said that it died because of a restrictive CLA. Read the thread linked here for an explanation: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27176807
To quote the relevant parts:
>I entirely agree with Kay and +Greg Kroah-Hartman that it was the CLA that caused systemd to be written instead of Upstart.
>But I don't need that self-affirmation anyway :) I wrote Upstart, I got paid for it, I moved on to do other things, something else came along and replaced it. If Upstart hadn't been under the CLA, and systemd hadn't've happened, all my code would have long since been rewritten by now anyway.