https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31550/files

I'm not seeing any way for a sysadmin to prevent the use of gratuitous dependencies without having to rebuild the whole program.

This is a pretty common problem with systemd-related programs, really.

Distro defaults don't mean I'm interested in keeping the same defaults. And switching out systemd with a custom build isn't as trivial as other programs where a bit of PATH shenanigans suffices (at least without breaking a lot of the package manager's stuff).