If you talk about cabals, there's no point in having a sensible discussion. Te existence of secret cabals is a matter of faith, and you cannot really discuss things of faith with reason alone.
In any case, both GNOME and Debian willingly adopted systemd. Thinking otherwise implies that GNOME and Debian developers are silly idiots: it that's the case, why bother. If it's not the case, they know what they want and nobody forcecully "pushed" anything.