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.
