Think whatever you shall about systemd of course, but please stop with the blind belief mud slinging:

  - systemd didn't create the patch to include libsystemd, distros did
  - current systemd versions already remove liblzma from their dependencies, the affected distros are behind on systemd updates though
  - you can implement notify in standalone code in about the same effort as it takes to use the dependency, there wasn't really a good reason for distro's to be adding this dependency to such a critical binary. systemd documents the protocol independently to make this easy. distros having sketchy patches to sshd has a long history, remember the debian weak key fiasco?