Why weren't any of these objections heard back before Canonical knuckled under? Was upstart even worse? I really enjoyed the "impotent rage" piece linked in TFA's comments.
There have been "better init" options for many years, none of which gained much traction. So most of us figured the community as a whole wasn't very bothered. IMO systemd has only achieved "popularity" by using some very underhanded tactics.
It's not really a "Poettering" thing.
More like a "Red Hat" thing. They control (= their employee are mantainers and developers of) most linux core userspace programs/libraries, starting from Udev and Dbus and Upower, they/their developers make the choices that matters in that regard.
It's how OSS operates.
upstart is terrible in its own special way. Beside that it loses track of anything with a more complicated structure than, say, fingerd, its "dependency" system is wholly back-asswards: a job specifies which other jobs to start when it is ready (as opposed to a job specifying which jobs should be ready before it starts).
There have been "better init" options for many years, none of which gained much traction. So most of us figured the community as a whole wasn't very bothered. IMO systemd has only achieved "popularity" by using some very underhanded tactics.