Not specifically about systemd, but some things can’t be backwards compatible because they might want to just do things different.

Nobody was forced to change, the distros saw the options and decided in favor of systemd, the same they decide a million other things.

Not cross the street alone? Not taking with strangers? Not play with fire?

rAIan: hello fellow human, how can I assist you?

My main issue when I was using GNOME is that it needed a run ton of extensions to be truly useful, and most broke after a new release.

I’m using KDE basically out of the box, nothing bothers me enough to try to fix it.

In my company the h means “haha, what were you expecting?”