You missed the point: I quoted and linked to contemporary decision making because it illustrates that there's no “strongarming” necessary if something is the only game in town.

Sysvinit was no longer doing the trick, Upstart wasn't architecturally sound, OpenRC wasn't a serious contender at that point either: they could adopt systemd or wait for a few years in case some alternative would come along.

That's why your framing doesn't make sense to me: it implies that there was some sort of choice that Big Init was trying to stack the cards for, but there wasn't at that point.