> You got nearly every forum and HN thread that even tangently mention systemd, flooded with people proclaiming systemd to be the spawn of the devil "forced down their throat".

There's a large cohort of Linux users whose entire personality is "I'M A CoNtRaRiAn!" and argued against systemd because Red Hat was pushing it. Reddit was filled with such a minority of loud anti-systemd trolls. Pushed for reasons for their disdain you'd get non-sensical or baseless replies. The best ones were known bugs that had been closed for months.