"there should be practical consequences for that supposed philosophical
wrongdoing. So where are the horror stories? Why aren't distros fleeing from
it? In fact it not only seems to work perfectly well, but outperform legacy
software such as with boot times, and distros are flocking to it"
Which is what everyone does to nonfree software in our OS. They don't flee,
they embrace it. It seems to not only work perfectly well, but outperform
free software in many things.
I'm not a staunch anti-systemd guy at all (despite my being on Slackware),
but I don't see how that's a very good argument personally.