Yes, there was an effort to turn all the dependencies into on demand loads, where possible. It started in 2020 with libpcre2: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/16260

But many others followed, like libselinux: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/19997

libqrencode: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/16145

p11kit: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/25771

tpm2-util: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/28333

libiptc: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/29836

libkmod: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31131

Exactly during the development of the libkmod PR, someone noted that libxz could be lazily loaded too: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/31131#issuecomment-1...

And so I proposed myself to to the job, nothing less, nothing more.

If you look at the code of the other PRs, you see that they are very very similar, there are also macros to easy this task, like DLSYM_FUNCTION()