I think you vastly over estimate the importance of the reddit/lemmy-sphere freaking out over this.

I don’t. The people I know in real life don’t take likely to the changes.

And the more insane the slippery slopes you imagine skiing down […]

This is the fallacy fallacy. There is a precedent for freaking out. Foreign routers being banned, countries and regions stating that this is only the beginning for age verification, you name it. Anyone who submits to that in any way unambiguously invites the new order that is enforced upon them, I say that in regard to systemd specifically.

The fact that there isn’t a serious programmer making a fork[…]

No serious programmer is forking systemd because systemd is more or less doing kernel tasks besides the Linux kernel. This violates GNU best practices. Not to mention openrc and plenty of other init systems existing as a yet uncompromised alternative. Also you are twisting what I am saying, I specifically am not promoting the fork in the article.

If it’s the vast majority of Linux users, how come there was not one that’s read the systemd docs?

You didn’t see the barrage of critism under the pull request, did you? Makes me wonder if you read anything at all.

milktoast law

The law is not at all non-trivial or milquetoast. With ID verification and other methods of age verification you absolutely can unmask users online if states demand APIs be implemented.

You sound like a narc btw!