Many people still think that it's a 3-way horse race between sysvinit, Upstart, and systemd (which systemd has all but won). The Debian technical committee certainly acted like that was the case last year.
A lot of people further neglect all the prior art in init replacements before those. The simpleinit dependency mechanism, depinit, initng, minit, daemond, Seth Nickell's GNOME experiments, eINIT, cinit and so forth.
Instead, the way it was presented in public is that the Linux distros had been battling with brittle sysvinit scripts (true, but also largely self-inflicted) for so long until systemd came in to heroically save the day.
It was pretty shocking to watch how the scene evolved from apathy to having an urgent problem that must be solved now.
OpenRC isn't an init daemon. It's only a process management framework, hence the name. It's usually used in conjunction with sysvinit as PID1. OpenRC was originally motivated by replacing the older baselayout scripts, from what I recall.
Upstart didn't come about until later from many of the alternatives I listed, and its origins were mostly in response to launchd. It was quite rudimentary initially. [1]
I never said or meant that Upstart wasn't younger than those alternatives. What I disagree with was the idea that there was much apathy and then a sudden crisis when systemd appeared. The development and adoption of Upstart and OpenRC (even if the latter isn't an init daemon, it's still an alternative to the init system) by some of the biggest distros contradicts that claim.
And i don't think many would have noticed the existence of systemd, as was the case with upstart, if the projects devs had not started lumping all manner of non-init projects into the systemd bucket.
My first encounter with the existence of systemd was while keeping half an eye on the whole consolekit+polkit+udisk rigamarole i apparently needed to get thunar (or more correctly gvfs) to automount stuff.
This when i learned that consolekit was to be replaced with logind, and logind required systemd as init.
That, to me, was a very WTF moment. It basically made a file manager dependent on a specific init being used.
