Looking at the 20 years before systemd, we apparently couldn't. There were a lot of init systems that were better than sysvinit, but only systemd played the politics part of init system adoption correctly.
And that's why people are so against systemd. It's not a better system. Sure, it has some parts that are better, but it, as a whole, is worse. They were just able to play the politics game. Not sure why people always tout that as a positive.
Well, I agree if by "played the politics" you mean "were willing to force it on users". The other alternatives to the init system were rejected because, in general, init was good enough. Not perfect - but not worth the turmoil, fragmentation, and re-learning required to change it. Basically, those who control popular distributions are able to ignore the masses who use those distributions. Open source has gotten lost.
