It is unfortunately trivial to argue that Devuan is without point, as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd. As, indeed, they said they allow for would when they decided to adopt it.
If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an entire distribution, rather than putting their effort into the much smaller problem space that is retaining functionality that Debian is quite happy to retain if its proponents are willing to put in the effort.
So Debian is going to integrate more with systemd than it would if Devuan didn't exist, and I suppose for that I should thank the folk behind Devuan. But it's always disappointing when people expend their effort against something, rather than for something.
Very happy Debian and systemd user here, in case you couldn't tell.
>"as Debian have proven themselves (per the article) entirely amenable to retaining the ability to run without systemd"
There's obviously more to this (and to Devuan) than just uninstalling systemd and installing sysvinit. Devuan's package repo (for which Debian is the upstream) contains a lot of customizations to allow certain packages to function with a sysvinit foundation.
And my understanding is that Debian would be quite happy to have those customisations too -- maybe with a little more upfront effort, as they have to coexist with systemd support. But with less ongoing effort, as the code is at least present to be able to tell if a change will break it.
Ultimately though it's entirely up to the developers where they put their effort. If folk prefer to work on a fork, they're entitled to do that. And it is a bit refreshing to see people putting at least some effort into not-systemd, rather than complaining about being "forced" to use it.
If anything, the presence of Devuan cements systemd even more tightly into position -- those who care about not running systemd are distracted by forking an entire distribution, rather than putting their effort into the much smaller problem space that is retaining functionality that Debian is quite happy to retain if its proponents are willing to put in the effort.
So Debian is going to integrate more with systemd than it would if Devuan didn't exist, and I suppose for that I should thank the folk behind Devuan. But it's always disappointing when people expend their effort against something, rather than for something.
Very happy Debian and systemd user here, in case you couldn't tell.