Poettering and Systemd are amazing and Linux would not be as good as it is today without them. Whether you like it or not, we can't have a fragmented ecosystem and expect people and companies to adopt it (see the 14 competing standards XKCD). Having one solid base that works the same on every client is like literally the base requirement for making a product for the said client. Systemd, flatpak, xdg-portals, pipewire and immutable distros all solve this.