Systemd catches up with bind events

Technically the upstream people couldn't have known, since the bug was introduced by an incorrect distro backport. And if a buggy systemd, one that spews assertion failures all the time, will slow boot down to a crawl, the systemd people might even consider that to be a feature. It can and will happen for kernel WARNs as well, and a buggy PID 1 is not much better than a buggy kernel. But these are details, and in general I think we agree.

What this shows to me, is that Linux is sorely lacking postmortems. Whenever Linus screams at me, I try to figure out what went wrong in my workflow and how I can improve it to avoid being screamed at in the future. On the other hand, if 5 years later people still believe that "debug" is a sacred part of the kernel command line (and not the more nuanced explanation that you gave), something went wrong on the kernel side in figuring out what happened.