I almost like to think of Linux in general being the CURRENT or UNSTABLE branch of UNIX. Then when things are finally correct, they are available for less hobbiest users.
You seem to be saying that Linux is used by hobbyists, and by implication that Linux development is driven by the needs and wants of hobbyists. Nothing could be further from the truth. The vast majority of all Linux installations are used as servers, by "professionals", such as the FAANGs (Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google, and by implication other large cloud-based companies such as Alibaba or IBM), by industry in general (GE, GM, and other companies whose names starts with "General"), by government (whether is is weather forecasting or national security), and by supercomputers. And the number of machines in these uses is gigantic. For example, look at the Top500 list of supercomputers: Every single one runs Linux, and each of them are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10^3 to 10^6 CPUs. The big data centers of the FAANGs have millions of Intel chips too ... mostly running Linux. The Linux ecosystem is dominated by professional server use, if you count the numbers.
Or look at public-facing servers. There is a reason it's called a "LAMP" stack: They all have Linux. There is some debate about Linux' market share among public-facing servers (depending on how you measure it, the number is between 50% and 90%), but the number of these machines is still huge.
It gets even more stark if you look at the money flow. Linux today is a big industry, with the two largest players being RedHat and SUSE. Those are multi-billion dollar companies. They drive the development of Linux packaging and the Linux kernel, together with IBM and Intel (both of whom contribute large amounts of manpower and money to Linux development, to some extent through the foundation). Both RedHat's and SUSE's revenue comes from customers who pay for supported versions of the OS (famously RHEL, where the "E" stands for enterprise). In RedHat's case, they de-facto control Fedora (through their sponsorship) and CentOS (which is just a free clone of RHELs packaging). There are many million Linux machines that get their OS distribution and support through these support contracts; very few hobbyists pay for support. So if you measure influence by the amount of money changing hands, hobbyists are even more irrelevant to the Linux ecosystem than by raw machine count.
Face it: Systemd exists because several large Linux entities (foremost RedHat and SUSE) think it is a good idea. And these people are neither stupid nor criminals. Systemd does indeed solve a real-world problem, namely that the whole mess of how to start processes and services had become unmanageable complex. In my personal opinion, systemd is low-quality software, which is focused on the wrong use case (Lennart cares about his desktop experience, and grudgingly supports server features), and written by a famously sociopathic person. But it is (for better or worse) still preferable over the alternative, which is why the Linux big companies continue to not just support but embrace it.
Personally, I use and manage quite a few Linux machines with systemd, and have even have to write services that work under it (including configuring systemd). It's painful at first, and after a while you get it to work. Would I prefer to do it in a RC-based or Init-based setup? Absolutely, but I don't get to make that choice.