This is sadly what seems to be the reality, and the sooner people realize it, the sooner we can safeguard our freedom. If things continue on this path, everything will become one integrated system like Windows, and people will have no freedom at all and forced to use x y z all, together.

Eventually when things develop this way, people will realize it, and everything SystemD dependent or whatever everything will depend on will be forked, and this will then become the free software community, while many will stay with the corporate/integrated system. It might even create a huge split, and force many distroes to make some real hard choices down the line, choices that they would not have had to make, had they not made the "easy" choice back when...

What has always been the strength of GNU/Linux has been the clear separation of everything. You don't just have a system. You have a Kernel, you have the init system, you have the base operating system (GNU), you have the graphics system, you have the desktop environments, you had the packages, you had the package managers, you had all the free software from all over the place. Everything seperate. Do one thing and do it well!!

In the end, if it happens that everything becomes dependent on Systemd, Wayland too, then all desktop environment becomes dependent on both systemD and Wayland and then many packages will depend on either systemD, a desktop which depends on systemD or a toolkit which depend on a desktop environment, then we are stuck in the integrated approach and things will only get worse. That's when people will wake up and fork everything. I just hope there will be enough developers who support freedom over convenience. Or more bluntly said, I just hope enough developers support the ideology of FSF and GNU rather than the approach of the Linux Kernel gang. And I hope the Kernel gang will support the GNU gang to avoid a fork of the Kernel as well.

It would be a sad day if the Kernel would decide to depend on SystemD as an init system.