All these articles....
I listened to the Tech over Tea episode with the GNOME guy about their new systemd dependence. Any regular distro uses systemd, everything is free software.
Nobody is forcing anything.
KDE is building new tech, streamlined, minimal, performant. And yeah that uses systemd.
But if people want to generalize components so they can work on OpenRC or worse init systems, I highly doubt that they will block it.
Or that they will block launching startplasma-wayland from any other login manager, which currently already works. This is just their login manager, with way more features that are crucial for making it a windows competitor, like headless RDP support.