The person who wrote the headlined article also wrote commentary back in 2014 on discussions of systemd, which highlighted the false dichotomy that people propound that the decision is between van Smoorenburg init+rc and systemd. You are doing that very thing, years later.
That was never the case, especially so for Debian that you mention. In the Debian Hoo-Hah, the choices were van Smoorenburg init+rc, OpenRC, Upstart and systemd; the latter three being the main contenders, as was acknowledged partway through the affair. In Fedora and Ubuntu, the choice was between Upstart and systemd, Upstart having been what they used for some years before systemd.
That was never the case, especially so for Debian that you mention. In the Debian Hoo-Hah, the choices were van Smoorenburg init+rc, OpenRC, Upstart and systemd; the latter three being the main contenders, as was acknowledged partway through the affair. In Fedora and Ubuntu, the choice was between Upstart and systemd, Upstart having been what they used for some years before systemd.
* https://web.archive.org/web/20141222234706/http://uselessd.d...