@Wanderer, I do get when you're coming from, and I realise that desktop Linux is in many ways a different OS from "Server" Linux (or just Unix). I would say that that was a mistake, but perhaps history has shown otherwise.

But I really think systemd was the wrong answer. It has way too many tentacles that are attached to the core monolithic monster at the centre (a 1 MB binary, BTW) which simultaneously make the whole harder to configure and debug and put the system in greater risk of downtime. Great for desktops, less great for servers and people who manage the bloody things. There's also a very strong portability argument, because outside Linux, systemd doesn't exist, and the people who wrote it just don't care.

Anyway, it looks to me like the powers that be have spoken, and those who want sysvinit over systemd are being forced to simply drop parts that depend on systemd, which for all practical purposes means GNOME. I sincerely hope that other init systems are considered, specifically runit or OpenRC, both of which are awesome, and both of which make more friggin' sense than systemd. Oh yeah, and server managers love them, too.

WRT the GNOME situation, there are a couple of shims already available to try and provide the systemd interfaces in userspace, but it looks like the Ubuntu shim used while Canonical were using upstart is now redundant since they, also, have gone to the dark side. Other options may yet emerge or exist. Honestly though, it seems likely that the dependency on this FreeDesktop nonsense will only increase, so I think it's fairly safe to say that things will get worse before they get better.

Okay. Sorry. I can't not comment.  I tried, but I can't.
Gnu is extremely popular.  Gnu is bone-crushingly popular.  I cannot state the popularity and importance of Gnu's software in terms that would fit in the universe.  Gnu maintains what used to be and probably still is the top compiler in the world--the only competitor is maybe Clang, maybe, but Clang doesn't run on even a fourth of the stuff Gcc does.  They've also got a lot of top math and science stuff, what I believe is the only FOSS Fortrann compiler, their software is sitting at the bottom of literally any Linux web server, and, in truth, you're wrong because they are already widely accepted by basically everyone who has ever had to use Linux, ever, and also a huge number of embedded programmers and manufacturers.  The Gnu Compiler Collection is the textbook case for when the GPL does good: no one could take it proprietary and it got good enough that people didn't want to write their own, so people contributed back to them instead--and because it's GPl, those changes had to be made available to everyone.  Until very recently, iOS app development was powered by GCC by default (and can still be, if you switch an option), and Android development with the NDK is likewise powered by Gnu software.
As for program limits, I just got done writing a voice tracking microphone in 512 bytes of RAM and 16k of flash.  In the general case, those limits you seem to hate are why you have a microwave: by placing limits on things we can make computers for less than a few cents.  More specifically, however, any change that actually raised the bootloader limits would break all the software that already exists.  The purpose of the bootloader is only to toggle some CPU flags and copy from the hard disk, at least in the first stage wherein it's 512 bytes, so that's fine.  If you need more than 512 bytes, you load up a second-stage bootloader and run that instead.  You are not supposed to be writing user-facing programs at that level; it is supposed to be very, very simple code.  Grub is not 512 bytes; grub is a multistage bootloader.  In fact, I can't think of a bootloader that allows multiple OS selection or, for that matter, even has a user interface that isn't multistage.  From what I understand of UEFI, these are being extended and simplified some, but the point of UEFI seems to be more about standardizing BIOS than anything.
But seriously, proprietary programming languages are a different problem entirely.  If you do open source software in one, everyone developing or using the software needs to own the language.  So you can't, at least not effectively, GPL or no.  It doesn't matter if it's Gnu, if it's open source and it's intended in any way that your end user compiles it, forget Purebasic.  To go ahead and head off what I'm pretty sure you'll say next, no, precompiled binaries does not work: there are something like 20 major Linux distros, Mac, Windows, etc.  And if it's in one of the mainstream languages like C/C++, we also have to count in Android; iOS is more questionable due to licensing concerns, but if it's popular and possible to be ported someone will.