No, see the reasoning why distros switched, e.g. Debian or Arch. TL;DR: technical merit, no good alternatives existed at the time, as evidence by how the Arch maintainer paraphrased the average systemd critic:

I think there might be this other project that possibly is doing something similar. I don’t really know anything about it, but I’m pretty sure it is better than systemd.

Would the landscape be more diverse if other people would have built someone when Poettering first announced systemd? Probably! Did anyone do it? No! OpenRC wasn’t a fully fledged alternative back then, Upstart had fundamental design flaws.

But does anyone regret adopting systemd? Also no! Everybody is happy. It’s robust, it works, it makes admin lives easier. Users no longer have to deal with zombies, slow boots, and unnecessary services running.

Here we go again with the conspiracy bullshit