You are right. I remembered reading an article from 2013 that gave the impression that the changes where related to systemd and then it shed a different light on the issues (https://lwn.net/Articles/555922/) but it looks like the features are mostly back and in a better shape: http://lwn.net/Articles/601840/
They want to prevent direct access to Cgroups, other than through a single writer. This change is happening regardless of whether you want systemd or not.