Well, both Linus and RMS have attracted their share of controversy. In the case of Linus, while you may not always agree with him, there seems to be broader support for his engineering choices. He has multiple projects that have dominated their spaces on their own merits. Whatever you think of Stallman, there is no denying his historical contribution.
For myself, I am more bothered by RMS. Although I know Chimera has shunned GNU for technical reasons, I would personally prefer a world where all GNU software has been replaced by alternatives. In my view, we would be better off to be free of RMS and the politics he has created around around “GNU / Linux”. The GPL itself is an important option in Open Source and, while it is not my favourite, I wish it and the projects that adopt it much success. However, the GNU Project itself is becoming an impediment ( my views only of course ). Luckily, the GNU project represents quite a small list of software projects despite the way people talk about it. Replacing GCC, Glibc, and Coreutils would be enough. Of these, the most damaging and the hardest to replace is probably Glibc.
Anyway, my intent is not to trigger people with such opinions in this thread. I do not want them to reflect badly on Chimera. My only reason for chiming in is to illustrate that Poettering is not unique in collecting detractors.
Finally, systemd did solve real problems at the time. There are other solutions now though so let’s not render them inoperable.
Also, not everything systemd wants to be now is better than the alternatives or even what came before. Not liking systemd does not mean wanting to go back to init scripts.
Btw, the system I use most daily uses systemd. I also use it in a project at work although, there, we have a strange bug “rarely” at shutdown that systemd is implicated in and I wish it ( and is ecosystem ) were easier to understand. So again, I find the Chimera approach attractive.