they work differently depending on the project.

so this statement:

> requires buy-in from an unusually large number of parties since it affects the OS, everyone shipping daemons, and the operators.

is only true in some cases.

c.f. rcng, which was developed by a very small few people, and is a generally sane improvement on previous BSD init that i've really never heard any complaints against vs the previous method.

same could have been true here. it was not - and the need for 'consensus' was largely sidestepped by the 'market pressure' of gnome being dependent on systemd features, and the leading core desktop environment that people had already attached themselves to, esp in the enterprise market.