What should put you off is people two and a half years later still wrongly ascribing this to systemd. And this even though, as noted at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11011399 , OpenRC had been doing the very same thing.
It wasn't a systemd thing. The people who relate the tale as if it were a systemd thing or something that the systemd people did are ill-informed. It was entirely a kernel thing. This was even stated outright at the time by the creator of that particular kernel mechanism.
I actually remember reading exactly this discussion. So I was correct in my original assertion that Linux (as opposed to systemd) culture is batshit insane because of all the Linux/Unix people defending efivars/Lennart's decision to 'not workaround broken efi implemetations' that allowed rm rf / to break hardware.
It wasn't a systemd thing. The people who relate the tale as if it were a systemd thing or something that the systemd people did are ill-informed. It was entirely a kernel thing. This was even stated outright at the time by the creator of that particular kernel mechanism.
To learn the real story, go and read https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11152880 where you will find Matthew Garrett xyrself participating in the discussion.