At this point, it's simply a bit too late. I'm sure in the early days it was still a choice, but when you want prepackaged things, you get systemd.
But if you are using software that other people provided to you for free, I think the developers also get a say in how things work. And in case you didn't notice, most open source licenses will tell you that they don't provide any kind of warranty.
There are some truly special people among Linux users that think diversity in init systems/libc implementations/etc is a good thing for a general-purpose desktop. They don't understand that people just want stuff to work, and developers don't want to support more than 1 init system (or other trivial thing) for their package.
Success of Linux on the desktop is fundamentally incompatible with diversity, but unfortunately not everyone gets that.
The vast majority of "server" distributions now use systemd as well.