Forking projects to put a different coat of paint on them is just silly. It's still the same project, it's just got your sticker on it now. You still dependent on upstream decisions. If things change too much for your liking, you have a growing patch management issue on your hands, and that's not fun. But hey, you're free to do it, that's the beauty of FOSS.

Reminds me of the Linux distros that just fork Debian, stick a new theme and logo, create a website and voilá. Nah, mate, it's still Debian.

What is there to evolve? Just keep it up to date with the mainstream project while applying this one patch. This is as useful as the signatures that prohibit use of comments to train LLMs.

That sounds super easy on paper. In practice nobody is going to do this long-term.

The kind of people who get massively upset about this are not the kind of people that are going to make a long term commitment to actually doing anything. Forking systemd is performative activism, that's it.