Indeed, volunteer time is seriously limited, and there are things that are just beyond what can be expected from them.
E.g. if a mayor DE would start requiring systemd to work, Debian would not be in the position to fork it, but that doesn't mean that non-systemd users will be forced to migrate to systemd, just that they would have to use one of the many other DE available in Debian.
ยน this is not that unlikely, however: there have been a number of calls for help because the numbers of complaints on the mailing list is much higher than the number of people actually giving even a tiny bit of help in ensuring that sysvinit continues to be tested and supported in Debian, and if nobody tests it, eventually it will bitrot and stop working.
That is why, runit and openrc are badly needed as options but no matter what, the developers of debian had no right to force all packages to require systemd if they are calling their distro "universally free or free software" because that is the opposite of how free software is supposed to work.
We really shouldn't put all are eggs in the same basket. Due to the number of holes that may exist. also, this makes it easier I am sure for the NSA and other corporate firms I am sure to hack into us. but meh go ahead and support a broken init especially the same one that many other distros use that if people figure a way out to hack in a specific way... has a domino effect... This may be hypothetical, but I am unnerved by this idea that's all. I may lack information but I am sure Luke knows far more terrifying details than I am suggesting...
That's my last thought on this hopefully for a while. ;)