Definitely not a publicity stunt. Every IT professional I work with is conservative, hates Lennard Poetering, and most of them, if they use debian at all hate systemd. I
Well we seem to know different professionals, most I know doesn't even have an opinion on systemd. Those I know who use Debian ( myself included on my Private Hardware) don't hate systemd, my guess is thst they would use Devuan if they do. The one thing I dislike is using Ubuntu as server but this has nothing to do with systemd but Canonicals way of doing things.
I also know nobody who "hates" Poettering, my own opinion: He is a gifted engineer with strong opinions ( not all I agree with, hard-coding Google-DNS so "Users always have working DNS" is just stupid, allthough I get where he comes from, he design systems for endusers not for people like us ) who explains them well enough ( see
https://0pointer.net/blog/ ) that it's easy to develop your own opinion on it. This doesn't mean that I agree with them, imho it's pointless to design Linux as Desktop System

My own opinion is: systemd has it's downsides but I prefer them to the downsides of classical init Systems.
At work all our systems ( sadly Ubuntu not Debian) have systemd and I wouldn't want it any other way. The sandboxing features of systemd alone it are worth it:
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Systemd/Sandboxing
And declarative units are way easier to write and debugging than init bash scripts.
I suspect most people who think that systemd-based systems are "more complex" and "harder to manage" are just used to the old way of doing things, of course it's easier if you done it that way for fourty years

But that's not a technical Argument.
Now this doesn't mean that systemd-less Systems doesn't have their usecases. Alpine is a great lightweight base for docker or System containers, I would never use Ubuntu or Debian as Base for a docker Image. But migrating Proxmox products to Devuan due to the unwillingless of old horses to learn new tricks would be a massive waste of ressources.
One thing I agree with you that your post wasn't for publicity, otherwise you wouldn't have waited over a year with the answer