That. They could’ve just supplied a default .profile / .bashrc. It’s these kinds of bells and whistles that causes most security bugs due to additional attack surface. Is it the root user fetching the news with wget/curl from a remote source?

All of systemd is the same shitfuckery. I move away from debian to slackware and voidlinux (when using BSD is not possible) just to avoid it.

Same here. My reaction at each step is “how do you delete this subsystem?” and “what poor person wrote this?”

Still, nice learning exercise for the author.

Exactly. I'm sure somebody wanted it at some point somewhere, but now it's on every system. No wonder people keep starting new minimal Linux distros.