> Systemd is monolithic,

It's monolythic in the same what that the GNU project or FreeBSD is monolithic.

It's a large number of utilities, tools, and daemons that is designed to provide the low-level features application developers and users demand from a modern operating system.

> It's much more than an init system;

Systemd is a init system, but systemd is also a major project that has taken on the task of unifying low-level Linux OS features.

> "Linux monoculture" is a real thing, and systemd makes it seriously more monocultural.

FreeBSD is a monoculture. OS X is a monoculture. Solaris is a monoculture. OpenBSD is a monoculture.

All these systems have their own init systems they designed with no regard towards Linux and replaced older systems and obsoleted them.

> It was not entirely gently pushed on everyone by Red Hat, by making Gnome dependent on it.

Lies and misrepresentations.

> OTOH the history shows that technically poor, and even terrible, things can get wide enough adoption and stick with us for a long time; X is a good example, SysV init is another.

Which is why people are working on replacing both X and SysV.

You want to know the real problem with anything-but-systemd crowd?

This:

> Of course, this approach is not viable if it turns out that too few people are interested in init system diversity sufficiently to do the reasonably substantial implementation work required to maintain a competing implementation of the systemd unit features we care about.

There is no 'If' there. Some people don't want systemd, but the only people doing the work are Systemd. So their choice is to stick with Linux from 2000's or use systemd. Because nobody wants to commit to making any alternative actually work.

Making noise online is annoying, but it ultimately is not something that goes into the decision making of people designing operating systems. People willing to do the work are the ones that get to make the choices.

If somebody comes along and makes a better init system then systemd then they can do it and if it is better it will get adopted.

You can pretend that this is all Redhat's fault, but they are the only real enterprise that made the transition from sysv in Rhel 5, to upstart in 6, and then to systemd in 7.

And, ironically with systemd, migrating to another different init system is massively simplified compared to the work it took to migrate from sysv init. So now moving to a new init system is easier then ever.

Why do I say this?

Because systemd has unified OS design for Linux in a way that never happened with sysv init. Sure people were using 'sysv' and all used shell scripts, but they were all fundamentally different from one another. Only the most complicated shell scripts imaginable (think Apache init) or the most trivial could be made to work on more then one Linux distribution. Meanwhile systemd uses a declarative configuration syntax that all you need to do is create a parser and you could effectively import any systemd application configuration into a system with equivalent or better capabilities in any operating system.

The same can't be said for any of the bash scripts developed by any of the distributions prior to this for their own sysv variant.