So your problem is really with the distros, not with Poettering et al. But as the old saying goes, if you think all the distros are assholes, maybe the problem isn't with the distros.
The problem is that key components are being "depreciated" by the Poettering crew for no better reason than "code elegance". Thus distros either have to take over maintainership a ever growing codebase, or accept the Poettering code wholesale.
One can really wonder what is going on when Gentoo opts for picking up maintainership while Debian, that has previously forked Firefox over trademark issues, does not (and Poettering etc are leaving snide remarks aimed at the Gentoo people for this "defiance").
One thing to keep in mind is the gorilla behind the curtains, Red Hat. Key devs of systemd etc are on their payroll...
I'm not a huge fan of the distros either, because they should've been on guard for this (having seen the nonsense of, say, PulseAudio).
The bulk of the blame, though, lies with Poettering and friends. Without rehashing every "systemd is terrible" argument out there (and there are many, and I find them as tiresome as you do to review here), the fact remains that political wheeling and dealing is the reason that the project has taken as much root as it has, and that the sheer smugness in the face of reasonable critiques is irksome.
Poettering is part of the group that is "Hey, Linux can be on the desktop too!". History hasn't borne this out, nor likely will it. They'd be welcome to experiment elsewhere, but for them it is anathema that the ecosystem as a whole not follow in their footsteps--and that kinda makes sense, honestly, because for their plan to work they have to kill off all of the features that conflict with their vision of the desktop. Unfortunately, those features are what are kinda important to us folks writing server and infrastructure systems.
It's never going to get fixed, and so we must go beyond the rim.
One can really wonder what is going on when Gentoo opts for picking up maintainership while Debian, that has previously forked Firefox over trademark issues, does not (and Poettering etc are leaving snide remarks aimed at the Gentoo people for this "defiance").
One thing to keep in mind is the gorilla behind the curtains, Red Hat. Key devs of systemd etc are on their payroll...