The great thing about unix is that there are no "wars" over these things, because everybody gets to decide for themselves.
Well at least that's how it was before systemd -- and all of DJB's unix work long predates systemd. By the time systemd came around DJB had been focusing on ECC exclusively for almost a decade.
The way I remember it is that most people didn't understand DJB and just kinda ignored his work, while a bunch of other people recognized what he was on to and integrated his ideas into software with frendlier user interfaces. For example, runit, which is PID1 for Void Linux to this day, and s6, which is PID1 for both Liminix ("NixOS-on-your-wifi-AP") and Spectrum ("Qubes for Nix"). Indeed increasing numbers of NixOS users are ditching systemd for s6.
Anyways I don't remember anything close to a "holy war".