Reminds me of Cantrill, more so his story when they completely bricked a machine of a fellow worker once and then took a close look at the standard[1].
# rm -rf /
Among other things, it will delete the current directory. In the standard it does not say what to delete first, In their implementation it will try to remove the current directory first -> undefined behaviour -> it fails.
The logic behind it: When is it really your goal to delete your entire machine, mostly never, you don't type it out by accident, but shell scripts with unset variables might do it.
And regarding Poettering's response[2] (not trying to start a fight): It's Poettering, what do you expect? You can hate or love systemd, but part of why people hate it is his intellectual arrogance in everything he does.
[1] He tells the story somewhere in here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6XQUciI-Sc (quite entertaining)