At the moment, just about every major distribution except Slackware and Gentoo not only supports systemd, but ships with it on by default.
So...what "battle" are we talking about? (Or did this post just fall forward five years from the past?)
Ubuntu is the largest distro I know of and it doesn't support it by default.
But you're right, all the arguments I've read against it boil down to Linus hating on one of the developers on the project and/or "It's too complicated and unmanageable!" I've yet to read something I'd consider a valid argument against it. A bunch of neck beards yelling "Get off my lawn!" is not and argument I can get any value out of.
When the neck beards speak, it's often prudent to at least listen.
I'm reminded of a myth, of when the Ancients were sitting down to design Unix, someone said "Why would we ever need a special file, that never contains any data, and always throws away everything written to it?" The Ancient replied, "Trust me, you'll need it." And thus, /dev/null was born.