Never fully, but it's how we got systemd nearly everywhere - GNOME 3.8 arrived with support for polkit-based approach for, among other things, power management, and mandated logind. Which at the time was very much a banana that required the gorilla and the whole jungle to run. Some tried to deal with it, some managed to even separate udev and logind out, but the immediate effect was that distributions that avoided systemd or made it optional - including ones that were exploring alternative paths, were forced to adopt systemd or remove support for GNOME 3.8 and newer.