If there's one thing I've learned about FOSS, it's that everyone is looking for an excuse to fork things. Linux will never develop a monoculture - because someone can and will fork it. How many distributions are there? desktop environments? Package managers? Text editors and IDEs? And even zooming out of linux, there's openBSD, freeBSD, etc; If you start yelling about monoculture, isn't sysv init the worst offender for that? We have less monocultures than ever before.

If you think freedom is the ability to run only the code you want, the only way you're ever going to get freedom is by writing everything from scratch. Software will never be exactly the way you want it to be unless you write it yourself.

Most software depends on other software. That's just how things work. GNOME is particularly bad offender for that - it installed apache for some reason last time I used it. But GNOME also does a lot of things I don't really need it to do. Maybe someone else uses those features, and that's OK. You can switch DE if you really don't like systemd that much. But if you don't, that's not denying you your freedom - you made a decision about the benefits and drawbacks of a product, and decided to use that product.

Nobody really says how systemd only took over for political reasons, there's just random posts on forums that make claims and link to some dude's podcast. There's really no reason to believe that the systemd people are malicious.

I think systemd is the wrong choice for debian/ubuntu. But there's no reason to badmouth people about it and say hurtful things. Just use something else.