I mean, systemd-run could do privilege escalation from day one. It's even the default (otherwise overridable by systemd-run -pUser=<user>). I have used systemd-run --shell on countless occasions when I needed a clean root shell without any traces of the current environment.
What is being announced is merely a thin layer of cmdline syntactic sugar over an existing feature, to make it closer to sudo in usage.
What is being announced is merely a thin layer of cmdline syntactic sugar over an existing feature, to make it closer to sudo in usage.
So I'm not sure what exactly you were missing?