> Another thing that was missed was that Lennart wasn't being unreasonable, nor was he saying it wasn't a problem (he specifically stated the opposite, in fact). I had a feeling at the time (based on his responses) that the reason he wasn't specifically stating he was going to fix it or open a bug report for it in systemd was that he was going to push it up-stack to a more appropriate place, and it looks like that's what happened.

This. It's really hard to blame this on systemd (not that people didn't try anyway).

I'd say it wasn't a bug in systemd's implementation, it was a bug in the design of systemd. Why require that evivarfs be mounted at runtime? You could easily make it so that it is only mounted at boot time if neccessary, or only when you run a tool that wants to write to EFI.

I'd expect file operations to only permanently affect storage devices per default. Sure you can mount almost anything as a file in Unix, but to automatically mount more than necessary is bad design. It's like placing mystery files in the filesystem, and when a curious user deletes or modifies them, they loose their monitor's color profile, there printer's firmware, or all of their GMail attachments. You could say it was the user's fault to mess with it, but I'd say it's weird to expose such things as files (unless explicitly asked for by the user or a tool).