Keep in mind that it all started 20 years ago with Pulseaudio. Pottering was not really a nice guy (on mailing lists ofc, I don’t know him personally) whose software I wanted on my machine.
Problem was never speed or even technical, problem was trust on original author and single-mindedness that they were promoting. Acting like it is the only way forward, so anyone believing in freedom part of free software was against it. Additionally, it was looking like tactics used by proprietary software companies to diminish competition.
It looked scary to some of us, and it still does, even worse is that other software started having it as hard dependency.
All of this looks like it was pushed from one place: Portering and RedHat.
While after 20 years I might have gotten a bit softer, you can imagine that 15 years ago some agresive and arogant guy who had quite a bad habbit of writing (IMHO) stupid opinions wanted to take over my init system… no, I will not let him, not for technical reasons but for principal.
I want solutions to come from community and nice people, even if they are inferior, I will not have pottering’s code on my machine so no systemd and no pulseaudio for me, thank you, and for me it is an important choice to have.