Actually it's been like that for a long time, and for a good reason.

/etc/fstab is parsed by systemd and converted int .mount unit files, so that they can be mounted when a) asked for it (auto/noauto) and b) as soon as possible.

think of the _netdev flag: it signals systemd that a mountpoint is network-based, and thus it will attempt to mount it only after the networking target (instead of waiting for it to timeout at boot time, fail , and possibly letting processes start reading and writing from/to an empty directory).

Running daemon-reload is generally system(d)-wide though: whenever systemd configuration is altered (think adding/removing/updating an unit file) you should let systemd know about that by running systemd daemon-reload (think of apachectl reload).