The latest changes implemented in the Systemd repo, related to or prompted by age-verification laws, have made many people unhappy (I suppose links about this aren't necessary). This has led to a surge in Systemd forks during the last days ("surge" because there have always been plenty of forks). Here are some forks that explicitly mention those changes as their reason for forking (rough time ordering taken from the fork page):
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paramazo/systemd "The systemd System and Service Manager without age verification"
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ganitam/systemd "Systemd fork just before the Age Verification addition. Hoping more capable developers and maintainers do same.."
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GSYT-Productions/systemd-fork "The systemd System and Service Manager, without the stupid Age Verification"
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speedythesnail/unret arded-systemd "The systemd System and Service Manager, without the ret arded age-verification commits"
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ta13579/systemd "The systemd System and Service Manager WITHOUT THE FUCKING AGE CHECKS"
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r4shsec/systemd-no-age-verification "This is systemd but without the age verification made via pull request https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/40978"
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Pingasmaster/fightthesystemd "Systemd without the nonsense: no age verification, no lighthouse built-in."
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Jeffrey-Sardina/system "Liberated systemd -- no surveillance. Ever."
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HaplessIdiot/systemd-saneagecheck "The systemd System and Service Manager with age verification bypass and polling rate options for said feature"
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Queer-Coded-LGBTQ/systemd-fuck-california "The systemd System and Service Manager, but without age bs added in."
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Codiak540/unshitted-systemd "A fork of systemd aiming to strip the Age verification. Sue me california."
Hopefully the energy of this reaction won't be scattered among too many alternatives, although some amount of scattering is always good.
I agree to some degree, but I think the issue of age verification is beyond this point. Yes, Linux users tend to be much nerdier and reactive than the general public. But they are the ones who use linux in the first place. Whether they gatekeep linux from others is another story, but the devs should know their audience by now - and hopefully care. And what's more - a lot of idealists (I wouldn't call them autistic, though that may be a factor) hate systemd in the first place. They already dont use it or don't want to use it. So the ones that do, I argue, are more mainstream. I am one of them. I don't want to go back to sysvinit and write a script for each new service. I also know that this doesn't end here. Today they add the field, tomorrow, some mainstream browser will depend on it existing and the frog will be boiled. Now it is not an API, but it's added in case anybody needs it. So you didn't even have to add it. And they didn't add a gender field in case anybody needed it, for example. Yes, Linux community would probably start arguing about that, but not nearly as much IMO. I think this is far more mainstream issue than you give it credit, honestly.