Hostility in plain sight

Fortunately, I'd been able to stay with versions of udev that still work without that sucker (more recent ones whine about its absense, but that's it). The headache kernel-side had been there from the day it got merged...

IOW, your reasons are more about disliking current udev dependency on that thing. All valid, and devtmpfs has enabled that shite, but it's not entirely fair to blame devtmpfs itself for it.

That probably was the last time somebody got away with "it's just optional, don't enable it if you don't want it" kind of excuse at merge time, though...