If anyone wasn’t suspicious of him before, you should be now.
I don’t know anything about the systemd drama, I probably should learn something about it. If it was buggy to begin with then those impressions last a long time.
There were people accusing him of working for microsoft, saying that he was developing systemd and related tools in a microsoft sort of way, not in a linux sort of way, such as making logs binary files (in a text-based environment with text-based tools). And all those systemd tools were becoming virtual dependencies for everything in linux, which was raising a lot of protest because of needless complexity being added, things randomly breaking, exploits, while Lennart and associates replied by denying these things and that it could all be easily switched off for other choices. And while this was going on he was accusing people of verbally attacking him, after he began trolling people working in linux associated projects (I saw some of this going on myself). He definitely wasn’t controversial for nothing. The first video in this list is a guy named Wolfgang Draxinger giving a presentation way back then on issues with systemd, in which Lennart Poettering began trolling him from the audience.
Actually, all the systemd controversy is the first time I remember seeing anything that reminds me of the covid vaccine controversy, the Hillary Clinton campaign controversy, and the general whiff of censorship involved in those things and others, whatever the underlying shared thing might be.
I think I’ll swerve this particular rabbit hole, I’m sure there are layers and intrigue abound though.