I find it incredibly useful - instead of needing to learn a million quirks about the init of every distro they all use the same predictable system now, you learn it's quirks once and those skills transfer everywhere. Hopping from Ubuntu to Debian to Arch to Fedora is trivial now compared to the old days.
That and systemd-boot and systemd-nspawn are awesome.
Linux has also overshadowed BSD. Diversity matters, but so do standards. Code interaction contracts (think APIs and syscalls) are the glue to make a program that will run on a lot of diffrent software/hardware stacks (like diffrent OSes and hardware combinations). Sadly specific implementation diffrences make the genaric contracts (like UNIX/POSIX) unable to be implemented pefectly.