It doesn't the user just fucked up. You can always run systemctl reset-failed whatever.service

It's not terrifying, it's mildly annoying. It's also fixed with 'systemctl reset-failed'. SysD doesn't know if 'systemctl start' was emitted by the operator or by a badly running script.

Hello, welcome to an init vs systemd rehash! :)

Well, it's behaving as documented and following the semantics of your unit file.

Though I agree the default is poor, if it bites you more than once, write a standard template to reuse for your unit files and/or write a wrapper that calls reset-failed for you. Systemd is far from perfect, but this is a minor nuisance.

SystemD's philosophy is incompatible with UNIX principles. This statement shouldn't be controversial, yet we live in a world where SystemD criticisms are treated like heresy, and Wayland is unnecessary and unusable according to some X11 users directly contradicting most X.org maintainers and contributors.