Seems like Upstart had decent adoption as an initd modernization effort until systemd becamse popular. Why was systemd accepted as non-fragmentary?
People hate on systemd as much or more than Upstart, so I wouldn't say it's any better or worse. But init is an example of something that the neckbeards thought Ubuntu didn't need to fix.
Neckbeard here. We don't mind it being fixed. But we'd prefer it was fixed with something which was better engineered and fitted into the entire ecosystem.
For example, the *BSD's have a completely different init system and dependency chain resulting in a large "WTF" moment now that everything suddenly has crap loads of dbus in it as a core dependency.