Your answer is 99% techno-marketing bullshit, but you still delivered the kernel of a credible explanation: systemd.

It makes perfect sense now. cri-o, being "daemonless", reinforces the central role of systemd in orchestrating system resources, whereas containerd, being a daemon, weakens it. I can see how Red Hat architects would not love the idea, given the importance of systemd in the RHEL/Openshift stack.

Thanks for enlightening me, if only accidentally.