>Practically universal
"I use Ubuntu and develop in full stack JavaScript so everyone else does too."
No, it is not "practically universal". Alpine Linux, MacOS, FreeBSD, illumos UNIX distros, etc. do not follow this imposed "standard".
>Even if there's a Linux distro going out of it's way not to set them
You have this backwards. The systemd standard is imposed on Linux, not the other way around.
>In practice I've never encountered users with a distro that didn't have these variables set.
"I use Ubuntu and develop in full stack JavaScript so everyone else does too."