Ian Jackson's general resolution to prevent init system coupling has failed to pass, the majority vote deciding that the resolution is unnecessary. This means that not only will Debian's default init be systemd, but packages will not be required to support other init systems. Presumably, this means that using other init systems on Debian (without using systemd as a base) will not be possible without major workarounds, or possibly at all. It also leaves the future of Debian projects such as kFreeBSD unclear, as systemd is linux specific.
The vote results can be found here
The winners are:
Option 4 "General Resolution is not required"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 19 2014, @11:16PM
It's probably statically linked, so it includes libc and other library code which adds to the size.
It's done that way so that you can still use it, even when systemd has fucked up your system so badly that dynamic linking isn't working properly, or the shared libraries aren't available because systemd has refused to mount the partition or device containing them.