Mounting a seldom-modified and highly sensitive and critical filesystem r/w by default, when the existence of buggy implementations is known, is a deeply irresponsible decision. Blaming the rest of the world for the fallout from their crappy design decisions is a pattern of behaviour among some systemd developers.
Fortunately you don't have to use systemd. I'm happily running Void Linux.
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.
Well frankly I don’t really care who won the bickering contest on this one or any other. Simply put, I don’t have time for all the things I need to do or desire to, let alone “tighten all screws” to my machine every single day.
I remember a guy at Uni who’d come to the study room, update the various spyware, malware sigs and let the Win machine purge itself for half an hour, while he had coffe and cigarettes.
Since several years, my biggest hassle has been to plug a TM backup and choose “restore from backup” when I bought a new Mac.
Drivers, power management, tweaking this-and-that... nope, my life demands those minutes back. I’m actively worried when I see Apple fuck up and potentially ruin this status quo because “innovation”.
Fortunately you don't have to use systemd. I'm happily running Void Linux.