This, exactly.

My first experience with SystemD (Ubuntu 16.04 IIRC) turned into a frustrating experience, mostly around trying to mount a NFS volume in /etc/fstab, defined with 'soft' and 'bg' mount options. SystemD would often fail to mount the volume, and as a result would never fully boot to login prompt. Additionally, on shutdown SystemD would hang again forever trying to unmount that volume. No amount of mount option flag tweaking seemed to make much of a difference, so I simply removed the NFS volume from fstab and manually mounted when I needed it.

Happily running MX Linux today and back to mounting NFS in /etc/fstab.