Actually Lennart working for RedHat is what gave systemd serious traction. If it came to 21st century software, there are numerous modern init systems around (dependency driven, fast) that largely predate systemd. If any of those systems had been widely adopted by now it would be probably far ahead of systemd in feature set.
OpenRC is what got closest to be the replacement SysV-Init, just by its qualities and market share. But other, nicer systems exist, but they never found wide adoption because the main distributions didn't let go of SysV.
Now Lennart claims all the bragging rights, but people who used modern init systems before it was cool know better (there are a lot of Lennart opponents among those, BTW).