Have you ever: Been disappointed, surprised or hurt by a library etc. that had a bug that could have been fixed with inheritance and few lines of code, but due to private / final methods and classes were forced to wait for an official patch that might never come? I have. Wanted to use a library for a slightly different use case than was imagined by the authors but were unable to do so because of private / final methods and classes? I have.

Systemd problems might not have mattered that much, except that GNOME has a similar attitude; they only care for a small subset of the Linux desktop users, and they have historically abandoned some ways of interacting the Desktop in the interest of supporting touchscreen devices and to try to attract less technically sophisticated users. If you don't fall in the demographic of what GNOME supports, you're sadly out of luck.