Some group of coders pissed off because the were rushed into shipping and a middle manager or two that were trying to make an arbitrary deadline blaming it on incompetent devs.
2024-02-29: On GitHub, @teknoraver sends pull request to stop linking liblzma into libsystemd. It appears that this would have defeated the attack. Kevin Beaumont speculates that knowing this was on the way may have accelerated the attacker’s schedule. @teknoraver commented on HN that the liblzma PR was one in a series of dependency slimming changes for libsystemd; there were two mentions of it in late January.
I think that this is a plausible explanation for a rushed schedule and an actually justified deadline.
There's nothing arbitrary about the deadlines, the clock was absolutely ticking.
Not James bond stuff, no beautiful high value targets getting seduced, its just some guy with ADD that spent about 15 days too many bike shedding and botched a critical deadline.