People's perceptions aren't unified. Some people will always dislike SystemD, and they are not be forced to use it. If every major distro maintainer loves it, some people still would hate it.
There's still a group of Unix users upset about the major init split that happened fourth years ago. Things will never be unified.
I think the main problem is not the init process, but the tooling around it that breaks systems. For instance systemd-resolved did break local resolving some years ago (maybe still today).
While it is optional, ubuntu installations come with it turned on by default.
There's still a group of Unix users upset about the major init split that happened fourth years ago. Things will never be unified.