> systemd looks like it was forced somehow on distros.

Distros adopted systemd because it solves a huge waste of time that distributors have to deal with: maintaining init scripts. systemd unit files are distro-agnostic and can thus be maintained upstream.

(There's also other useless idiosyncrasies that systemd plowed over, so there's even less work for distributors to do. Or rather, more time to do actually interesting work to differentiate their distribution.)