Debian decides on systemd—for now

The lack of evidence anywhere that Google is patching/fixing even a forked upstart for any of the deep problems in upstart I think screams loudly in its silence. And upstart as deep problems in its design. Even if they were just patching it and publishing their own fork of the codebase to avoid the CLA issue..that would be some indication that Google is invested into upstart long term. But I'm not aware of that going on.

That being said, Chrome isn't a dynamic or complex an init target right? It's not really a general purpose desktop or server is it where you can install lots of addon services? As a typical Chromebook user, how much control do you have over what services are starting up or not?

It's most likely that Chrome represent a very well defined init target with a well defined, nearly uniform, set of services that will be running on all installs and that upstart's service management suffices without running afoul of the problems in the event model that other service configurations will hit.