Nothing stopped anyone, including yourself, from modifying or forking a distro like Fedora to make it support non-systemd, it's just you can't expect others to do it for you.
Others made this inconvenient.
It's not about expectations it's about distributions going out of their way to remove choices from users in some highly opinionated ways.
Which is all fine, I just won't use your distribution, what surprises me are the people who feel the need to step in an "defend" this rather pointless outcome for some reason. My favorites are those who suggest that this had to occur in order for linux to "mature" or "become modern."
Forked by Oracle, Rocky Linux and AlmaLinux, for reasons other than systemd.
Pottering et al went out of their way to make this harder than it would otherwise be (e.g. adding the gnome hard-dependency on logind which they then variously claimed was necessary, was unintended, was accidental...)
Nothing's stopping me from modifying Windows to do what I want either, it's just hard. There was a time when Linux people cared about whether their systems were easy to modify.
e.g. GNOME Shell now uses systemd user services to manage its sub services rather than starting them itself. Why? Because systemd does service management a lot better and provides proven features (logging, sandboxing, cgroups etc) rather than GNOME having to re-implement them.
On the contrary, as the article describes, Pottering and the RedHat team pushed all these projects to adopt their stuff, and part of that was making the patches themselves and saying a lot of things that turned out not to be true. It absolutely wasn't an organic success on its technical merits.
apt-get install sysvinit-core
(And more importantly it killed all other well-behaved cooperative init options - this isn't about systemd vs sysvinit, it's about systemd vs standards-based init systems that play nice)
> Perhaps as BPF subsumes Linux into making it a managed-runtime hybrid kernel with subsystems becoming increasingly componentized and instrumented (with early signs in the proposal to add Linux Security Module hooks to BPF programs), as pidfd/process descriptors allow for reliable supervision to be distributed across self-contained processes, as the native Linux mount API becomes more event-driven on its own, and as a generation of Rust fanatics in their undying religious zeal insist that all men are obligated to offer sacrifices to the borrow checker, a new shift may emerge where once again, the init system is made to cease mattering.
Alpine, Devuan, Gentoo and other devs have kept init choice available.