Both Wayland and SystemD were supposed to be solutions to important, longstanding problems. They’re just not good solutions and they have a lot of zealots pushing them.
systemd's big initial push was "boot times", there was tons of shilling on /g/ and other forums about how systemd was booting so fast. It wasn't even trying to solve a problem at first, it was just supposed to be a fast init. Then it started turning into a cancer that wanted to consume Linux based environments and solve tons of "problems" people never realized they had.
I saw a good postmortem on SystemD from someone with deep knowledge of Linux, BSD, and MacOS. He said you could have predicted the feature creep of SystemD early on and made it more modular so that it could use other subsystems (like the ones we already had), but that didn’t happen. Instead we’re stuck with this mess that has taken over almost everything between the kernel and user space. To do SystemD right you’d have to start again from near the beginning.
Wayland could be good if they wake up and realize that GUIs are complex and developers need those specific things they are able to do with the messy, wide open X11 API. The flexibility Wayland needs can be added to what is already there. The performance can also be improved; it’s not that bad as it is. They refuse to acknowledge these things though so Wayland’s only hope of being as useful as X11 is a fork. I have more hope for XLibre.
there is NO longstanding "problem" in init, classic or X11
there is someone looking to CREATE a problem so he can provide a solution
once you see the pattern of "CREATE problem -> provide solution"
you cannot unsee