There are things that are worth diversifying on. Basic subsystems that only serve to keep the OS running is not one of them -- the benefits of standardization far outweigh the costs of lack-of-diversity. (Of course this is just my opinion, yours may differ.)

As to freedom: I'm not sure what you're driving at here. Can you expound?

I think freedom and diversity simply do not exist one without the other. Freedom of choice that has been essential in making Linux popular in the first place may be severely limited by imposing more and more "standards"; I would argue that the very spirit of Linux lies exactly in this freedom. This is why we have so many distributions; and the more we standardize, the less need there is for this diversity, which, I think, is bad for Linux and, ultimately, for its users.

Ah, yes, the old

> freedom and diversity simply do not exist one without the other.

"freedom and diversity" defense. Nobody's trying to take that away, FWIW.

It may feel threatened, but I assure you that systemd is the least of your worries if you really care about F&D.

When everybody standardizes on possibly the worst implementation available for that platform, then it is worth diversifying.

Worst by whose standards? Obviously it works quite well for a huge number of people.