[rainbow29822]

That isn't "political power" it's called knowing your audience and knowing what they want. The audience here is Linux distribution upstreams who also participate in Freedesktop. The other alternatives had ample time to talk to these people and copy the features of systemd and improve on them but they refuse to do it. They seem more interested in building for their own niche use cases and ignoring everyone else. That's a fine decision, but it's their decision. They can't say it's anyone else's fault.

Edit: If those other developers were really serious about trying to replace systemd they would be going around to every distro maintainer they can possibly find and asking them what systemd is doing badly and what they'd like to see in a better project. Then they'd have to think really hard about whether it's easier to fix those issues just by contributing to systemd, or whether a full replacement is warranted. Every now and then I see comments about writing replacements in Golang or Rust or some other memory safe language but there's no other interesting ideas there to warrant a rewrite. Maybe you do all this and conclude there are no major complaints from the big systemd users, and that's just how it is.