The init war was never properly "fought" to begin with. It was presented as a false trichotomy between systemd, Upstart and OpenRC, when there were other options lying in plain sight that could have been researched, such as depinit: https://web.archive.org/web/20050206182736/http://www.nezumi...
systemd was simply far more visible and offered more than Upstart, which wasn't all that well engineered, admittedly. OpenRC was largely skimmed over, for some reason. systemd also had that aura of being "innovative," even though most of its concepts are old and were done well by systems such as Solaris SMF (although it isn't without flaws, either).
systemd came in at the right place, right time, was given a boost by a company as renowned in the developer community as Red Hat, and as such was adopted as a solution by people looking for a convenient fix, rather than actually trying to tackle the issue from the core.
I agree that the two developers are really good community people and therefore are able to win over votes that might not be as objective as they should have been. But I think it's also a skill to tackle a community together and focus them on one goal. This also improves FOSS as a whole, even if the software might not be the best.
systemd was simply far more visible and offered more than Upstart, which wasn't all that well engineered, admittedly. OpenRC was largely skimmed over, for some reason. systemd also had that aura of being "innovative," even though most of its concepts are old and were done well by systems such as Solaris SMF (although it isn't without flaws, either).
systemd came in at the right place, right time, was given a boost by a company as renowned in the developer community as Red Hat, and as such was adopted as a solution by people looking for a convenient fix, rather than actually trying to tackle the issue from the core.