Similarly upstart, from 2006, widely deployed before Redhat brought in systemd. And got dropped when Debian decided to go with systemd. Surprising how this gets misremembered given the hate systemd initially received.
I remember it well. At least Canonical also jumped on the systemd bandwagon when upstream (Debian) made a choice, instead of dragging upstart on, like it has done with countless other projects that are past their time (juju looking at you)