I mean it seems like the solution was accepted after someone suggested it. Can't fault someone for not offering a perfect solution when they didn't think of it.

"Revert the code to preserve the previous behavior" is bad because the design is wrong and will be surprising to someone else in two months.

"Fix the behavior" is bad because it breaks existing configuration that relied on the broken design.

The systemd devs seem to, as a matter of philosophy, prefer breaking things in order to do things right so I think anyone who pays attention to the mailing lists would have called the initial decision from the beginning.