Yeah it's sad to see the state of the community. Personally it wasn't a reason for me to leave though. I used Void in the past and started liking runit, so now i like to go off the beaten path when it comes to init systems. It's not very feasible to use NixOS without systemd though, apart from a few small projects that aren't well tested and barely have documentation. Initially i wanted to stick to runit, but recently i finally decided to give guix and shepherd a go. So far i do actually like that shepherd is a little less minimal compared to runit, and actually has more features baked in, like support for one-shot services, timers, and being able to make services depend on each other. I finally installed it on bare metal yesterday, but i still need to work on my config a bit.