In 2015 Debian officially dropped the requirement that packages support sysvinit scripts and only required systemd support. Devuan is indeed intended to be a fork that only removes systemd and maintains support for other inits like sysvinit, openrc, runit, etc.
Last time I looked (and it has been a while) the anti-systemd origin story had attracted a few nutters, but I didn't see anything suspicious about the dev team itself...
EDIT: I see a couple connections to cryptocoin crap, but no smoking gun yet. Still digging.
EDIT2: wtf am I looking at: https://dyne.org/software/dynebolic/ strange vibes all over this.
EDIT3: Seems like the cryptocoiner, Set Hallström AKA Setto Sakrecoer, is the main dev/organizer of devuan? The structure of devuan and dyne.org does not seem to be set out, instead it's an informal "do-ocracy" with a whole mess of normal and weird projects in a loose constellation.