What exactly did companies gain from making Linux distros switch over to systemd?

If anything, the switch ment a loss of productivity as their staff needed to relearn stuff, not to mention loss of technical knowledge as there would be others who simply would not accept the change and leave the company when the change happened.

This means increased costs, either due to retraining, or due to needing to hire new staff which is expensive.

Meanwhile, I can't see anything that would mean that companies would earn or even save enough money to make it worth the effort of making distros implement systemd.

Ok so doing it for direct gain seems to be out, but you mention "corpo sabotage of opensource", I can't really see that either, a developer won't move a successful Linux project to Windows, AIX, Solaris, Darwin or HP-UX just because of a move to systemd.

So even indirect gain seems to be out, so "corpo sabotage" doesn't really seem plausible.

But, I may be wrong, please, tell us how exactly a move to systemd has benefited companies enough that it would make the effort and expense to make a distro move to sytemd, let alone a majority of distros, worth it.