The point is to make it difficult to offer a credible enterprise Linux distro that's not full of Red Hat-steered software in key places, turning you into a cheap knock-off of Red Hat with little say in what happens to the software you're providing, in terms of future development. It now costs a lot more money to get out of Red Hat's shadow & control, as a would-be Red Hat competitor—they're not just another distro among many, they run the damn show.
[EDIT] Nb that for the above it doesn't even matter if Systemd's better than the pile of interchangeable daemons and programs it replaced. I have opinions on that, but it's irrelevant to Red Hat's market maneuvers, aside from that it was important to them that it not be easy & safe to cleanly replace, in part or whole.
(Preview: It's mostly Microsoft, Meta and Suse.)
[EDIT] If I'm not communicating this well, consider: if Red Hat steers several key projects that basically all other serious distros are stuck with (in no small part due to Red Hat maneuvering that sure looks like it was designed to bring this situation about on purpose), how can another vendor ever be anything more than a knock-off of Red Hat? Ubuntu tried to fight them on each of these points, and others, and lost every time. Result: if you're running Ubuntu, much of your system is defined by, and the future development of it steered by, Red Hat. You're practically running a Red Hat knock-off, aside from their dead-man-walking FlatPack competitor, Snap. May as well just pay for support from a budget RHEL vendor... oh, wait, those just got cut off, guess you'll be paying Red Hat. It dramatically increases their moat and the cost of building a credible competitor that's not basically just off-brand Red Hat with less ability to steer the future of the platform.