More like people were forced to use systemd and gave up due to lack of choice, along with an entire generation not old enough to know SysVinit.
The "forced to use systemd" meme is a weird inversion. No one complained about being "forced" to use sysvinit when their was no choice, but when distros started to use systemd, which still allows to use sysvinit style services, that's suddenly framed as an infringement of free choice.
journalctl is good idea executed terribly. It's builtin data format is massively wasteful and not even good at searching for data you want (often need to go thru all the files anyway)
Journalctl with SQLite or a columnar embedded database would be amazing for sysadmins. Current format is entirely useless