“unix for human beings. no systemd” my brother in christ most humans, unix users and all, don’t know or care what systemd is. This is a distro for a tiny number of hypernerds.

You don’t just convert and sleep though. You convert and prune. You slowly rework parts post-conversion to use more sensible approaches/libraries. It’s not a one-and-done operation, it’s an ongoing thing that they judge the cost of investing in now is less than the long term maintaining C Ubuntu.