Three things:

1.- MX empowers the users to decide. It provides options and systemd is opt-in.

2.- Debian also used to provide options and still does to some extent. One exception being systemd, which is pretty hard to avoid/remove. In that particular respect, who knows why, they have chosen the tyrant way.

3.- It is not at all about "shinny stuff". For different reasons, I need to compile a lot of software for my work like scientific code and machine-learning stuff like Tensorflow. Some of that code you can build in any system, old or new, because the developers use stable OSs such as Debian, or, more often, RHEL or derivatives. However, most of the developers are running more current systems such as Ubuntu, Gentoo or Arch and, very often, their code depends on newer versions of several libraries than the ones you can find in Debian stable. Of course, you can install them locally and link against them anyway or use containers. However, from a practical point of view, it is a lot faster and easier if you can just compile most of the code without having to go down that road (think, for instance, about the dependencies of the dependencies and so on). This essentially forces me to use Ubuntu (Mint Xfce) at work, if I want to be productive.

Linux is not just server administrators and desktop users/distro-hoppers. There is life in between. There is also us scientists, engineers, developers, audio/video creators, designers, architects and other technical professionals. Let's say workstation users, for short. Typically, we need a trade-off between stability and currency.

Traditionally, we have been a minority but, with the advent of so called artificial intelligence our numbers are growing exponentially.

And what about a working (tested) how-to on how to decontaminate Debian Testing?