I think the context that a lot of people seem to miss is that this default was never used in practice with a real Linux distro. So in effect it was never really an issue in the real world since the default was always changed.
Then why provide a default at all? Especially one that isn't suppose to be used publically like google's?
So systemd at least compiles without manual settings, and convention over configuration trends. It would be ideal if they just setup their own NTP server for the default though. I think from a practical perspective though the whole thing was blown out of proportion.
It requires a configuration file to even compile? How's that work?