Linux is now effectively systemd/linux, and is attempting to become flatpak/systemd/linux through various corporate sponsored initiatives. The only thing worse, in my eyes, are people who distribute things as docker containers.
The Linux distro as such is becoming an anachronism. There’s no real place to innovate without the inertia of choices made by external projects being enforced on you.
I think it’s a generational change. My generation had Microsoft to contend with, and so sought certain freedoms, but this generation has walled gardens and AI to contend with, so freedom à la Microsoft seems okay and so Linux is being Windows-ified, while Windows itself becomes its own abomination.
This is my issue with systemd. I wanted Linux because I wanted to have a choice. The philosophy was that users should have a choice. Systemd goes against that: it's taking over everything and more and more projects require systemd. Flatpak as well: if a project only supports flatpak, chances are that it won't be easy to package normally. So if I don't use Flatpak, I'm screwed.
People who don't see the problem with systemd "because it works" miss the point, IMO. It's like those devs who proudly ship their project in a docker container, because they are not capable of making it properly available to package maintainers. "It works", but I can't package it for my distro because it's a big mess. Developers don't have to package their project for all distros, they just have to properly provide the sources. But more often than not, they don't know how to do that, and instead see Flatpak/docker as "good alternatives that just work".
A lot of people said you can edit /etc/init/ scripts, but this was pretty annoying, as the moment you upgrade the package, your package manager throws a conflict at you. It was certainly non-scaleable if you have many machines with automated upgrades. Compare to systemd overrides, where there is both drop-ins and wholesale service replacement, and system upgrades never mess with that.
Heck, even something as simple as "disable distribution-provided service" was a pain! I can't remember how many times I've added "exit 0" to /etc/default/something file, just because the sysvinit did not respect user decisions during upgrades or reinstalls! Compare to systemd, where I can "mask" the service even before it's installed.
And for deeper changes? Pre-systemd ubuntu had this this stupid "system is online" idea, and I once needed to customize this.. this was lots of undocumented reading and hacking on the script, and let's hope we did not need to upgrade. Or something like "my service X should start after NFS, but ssh should start before NFS" - this was pretty hard as well, and would cause upgrade conflicts.
Systemd has lots of problems, but the customizeability is one of their best parts. It is the only thing that I know which clearly delimits "user" vs "distribution", and gives all the power to user.