I'd like to read this part about RHEL throwing their weight around on the Debian lists. Given your implication is that Debian was clearly "forced" to adopting it, I imagine the relevant evidence shouldn't be hard to find.
(Alternatively, you could actually ask other Debian maintainers yourself, like Josh, in this thread how it went. But you already did that and it didn't seem his narrative aligned with yours, so...)
It might be worth everyone's while remembering that Debian is not the be-all and end-all here, even though it did have a massive hoo-hah. The processes in other distributions were markedly different.
* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11834348
* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/debian-systemd-packaging-hoo-hah.html
Arch rc maintainer decided to drop rc for systemd.
The linked evil-poettering intermezzo seems to be irrelevant and strawman-ish too.
The process at Debian started years later than any other distribution. It involved various votes, at least a year of discussion, etc.
Then in 2017 someone ignores history and summarizes this into "RHEL was throwing its weight around"... ?!?
Add to that the games they're playing with interfaces, and at some point, it starts smelling like a miniature, farcical version of Microsoft in the 90s.