Didn't they do some woke stuff to alienate a good portion of the engineers/programmers last year?

It's a tough thing to commit to. Plenty of people will do it for some recognition while young but once they have what they wanted it's pretty easy to step away and write some emotional blog post about not caring anymore. Not a systemd fan, but the sheer amount of abuse that Poettering cops constantly is a good indication of what you actually will be signing up for, angry autistic nerd rage dumped in your inbox every morning is not to be underestimated. That said I'm sure it can be rewarding work for some. There's people still maintaining linux drivers for fucking obsolete hardware so there's certainly something in it.

Only if it wasn't written in C...