Hold up. Please don't invoke the argument from popularity, it simply doesn't work. The lead developers of major distros, as smart as they may be, do make mistakes (Debian with cdrkit, sticking with libav for too long, the PRNG bug, etc.) and they may not be fully in line with the intricacies and conceptual differences between process management, init, supervision, hotplug and so on. There's lots of misinformation from both sides and a lot of knowledgeable people (like those maintaining powerful daemontools derivatives) have never been ones to proselytize, but stick to their inner circles.

Furthermore, how are you sure the decision to adopt was entirely technical in nature? Perhaps they realized that the incoming systemd-integrated Linux desktop userland wasn't worth the maintenance hassle of trying to avoid it?

The way Lennart worded those sentences sounded funny. He is known to distort and exaggerate when promoting, for which I don't blame him, since his goal is to get his software adopted, but nonetheless. systemd proponents have been all too eager to completely dismiss any political meddling on part of systemd's adoption as totally unsubstantiated, insisting it was purely "technical merits". Lennart's words paint a subtly different picture, at the least.

Most people don't fully grasp the state of Unix process management, so it's no surprise they're susceptible. For example, the only alternatives that have been debated primarily were Upstart and OpenRC. That's a red flag.