But debian has chosen to adopt systemd, so at least some substantial part of Debian developers preferred going with it to keeping the status quo with sysvinit. Maybe they were badly influence by Redhat/Poettering, but it was their call.
Of course they were influenced by the author of programs they use. They were also influenced by Linus Torvalds when they decided to use his kernel. I don't see any problems with this. That's what you do when you make something that you're proud of. You go around to other people and try to convince them to use it.