If those major distributions have adopted it they may have had some reasons to do so, isn't it?
So you basically don't trust the maintainers of major distribution, yet you rely on them to provide certificated support (which I guess is the reason why you require approval).
This is a problem in your organization and has really nothing to do with Lennart.
I share the opinion that some people in the kernel team should reconsider the way they express themseves, but if you judge based on who has not been insulted on LKML you'd be left with very few people. Linus himself recently said that he has no strong opinion on systemd and in fact uses it.
I won't discuss your accusation that his software is "the polar opposite model of the operating system he's building it for", it's just your idea of said OS and probably doesn't match what the majority of the developers of said OS think.
We probably read very differently what Lennart said, but I'm quite sure e didn't say "'fuck you' to everyone who develops open source software".