The power of the multinationals is the reason we have systemd and it's ilk. Debian would back in the day have supported multi inits as a matter of course. To support user choice. Now they can't compete against the corps. RedHat simply can gain the system by chucking more devs at it. It may be a free-software package but volunteers simply can't keep up with the work required to maintain user choice. I believe in 10 years time assimilation in all but name will be complete. (This is the main reason I don't run Devuan as my main system.) There needs to be somewhere for distros to go when this happens.

We also see a rise in anti copyleft from the big corps. Show me a big 7 that uses copyleft by default where they have a choice. This is about the same thing. Control and power. The only time I see big corps using copyleft is where they don't want other big corps to not share the code! 

I think Hyperbola recognise this and simply don't try and kill them selves chasing rainbows. They just drop non-free packages and packages that try and obfuscate no matter what they are and try and work on the things they can do. They choose their rainbows carefully like the firefox, where they maintain the iceweasel-uxp packages. It's easier to maintain that than try to keep fixing each new "feature"  firefox either inserts or removes. That said I think their plan to fork OpenBSD is very ambitious and I'm not sure it can be realised. I hope they succeed but have my doubts.