This is a major criticism against Linux distributions from the beginning. Especially from the *BSD camps.
And Systemd project is full of people actually putting the work into solving this major problem.
You are right that it isn't innocent. It is actually very sophisticated and probably very wise thing to do. It is helping a lot of people out.
The actual major problem is that systemd developers wasn't being contempt with just building an opinionated system and let it rise on its merits, instead they choose to use its status to "gently push" their opinions on everyone else.
Also you're ignoring the last part of that sentence: "where there's really no point at all in doing so". That's the most important part. If a distro has a real reason to deviate then that's fine. If a distro is deviating for no reason then that's doing a disservice to its users, and you can expect anyone who ships other things for that distro to be upset with them for pointlessly making extra work for everyone else. It's not just the systemd developers who will be inconvenienced.
It isn't as innocent as you paint it.
systemd developers have other agendas when making decisions , you can hear it from horses mouth:
"Well, it is definitely our intention to gently push the distributions in the same direction so that they stop supporting deviating solutions for these things where there's really no point at all in doing so." [1]
And after watching systemd development for years I might argue they have a very liberal interpretation of what constitutes "senseless configuration differences between the distros for the really basic stuff"
[1] https://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/systemd-devel/2010-Se...