Debian was actually the last major GNU/Linux to adopt a modern init system by
default. There has to be a default. And it is a lot of work to maintain
init scripts or several init systems, especially sysvinit's horrible Shell
scripts.
Debian's technical committee *decided* through vote (their usual procedure)
after a (very) long debate that this default should be systemd. Nobody
forced them. The debate was mostly about systemd vs. Upstart, which is now
unmaintained and unused (Ubuntu abandoned it in favor of systemd). The other
init systems that were proposed, sysvinit and OpenRC, were deemed inferior.
See https://wiki.debian.org/Debate/initsystem for the (technical) defenses
that the proponents of each init system wrote and
https://bugs.debian.org/727708 for the final discussion, technical as well.
Whether you like it or not, all major distributions chose systemd for
*technical* reasons. You ignore those reasons and that is fine. If you are
not a sysadmin, a developer or a package maintainer, you will probably not
even see any difference! Yet you are against systemd. And you propagate
FUD.
Like any major low-level piece of software, systemd is audited.
https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=systemd lists 23 CVE. As
far as I can tell, they are all either already fixed or about local exploits
(who cares?) or do not depend on changes in systemd (but on solving bugs in
AppArmor).
I will not install Debian just to try to change the init. Not looking at the
documentation, I would simply try to install the package corresponding to the
desired init. I imagine APT would then propose me to change it. Doesn't it?
Now removing "libsystemd0" obviously removes all packages that depend on it.
If there are many of them, then that only means developers like systemd's new
features. It is their decision to depend on "libsystemd0" so that their
program is better (nobody adds useless dependencies!), not Debian's.
