Debian is a large, complex operating system, and a huge open source project. It’s thirty years old now. To many people, some of its aspects are weird. Most such things have a good reason, but it can be hard to find out what it is. This is an attempt to answer some such questions, without being a detailed history of the project.
Give the mailing list archives of the time some reading, the decision was definitely not consensual. I’m glad gentoo, slackware and, later devuan did not take the easy way out. Being few (their site lists ~1100) as an argument, well… dunno, fairly understandable maybe.
What do you mean by compromised?