I don't know why you think none were mentioned - to name one, they link a GitHub issue created against the systemd repository by a Googler complaining that systemd is inappropriately using Google's NTP servers, which at the time were not a public service, and kindly asking for systemd to stop using them.
This request was refused and the issue was closed and locked.
Behaviour like this from the systemd maintainers can only appear bizarre, childish, and unreasonable to any unprejudiced observer, putting their character and integrity into question and casting doubt on whether they should be trusted with the maintenance of software so integral to at least a reasonably large minority of modern Linux systems.
Unfortunately this makes modern Linux not reliable.
https://github.com/systemd/systemd/pull/554
What's your suggested alternative?
Using pool.ntp.org requires a vendor zone. systemd does not consider itself a vendor, it's the distros shipping systemd which are the vendor and should register and use their own vendor zone.
I don't care about systemd either way, but your own false representation of facts makes your last paragraph apply to your "argument".
That if they do not wish to ship a safe default, they do not ship a default at all.
I don't mean FUD in a disparaging sense, more like literal fear of the unknown causing people to be excessively cautious. I wouldn't have any problem with Oxide saying "we went for what we know best", there's no need to fake that so much more research went into a decision.
I think arguably the bhyve over KVM was the more fundamental reason, and bhyve doesn't run on linux anyway.
I am obviously biased as I am a KVM (and QEMU) developer myself, but I don't see any other plausible reason other than "we know the Illumos userspace best". Founder mode and all that.
As to their choice of hypervisor, to be honest KVM on Illumos was probably not a great idea to begin with, therefore they used bhyve.
While it's true that I'm a dyed in the wool illumos person, being in the core team and so on, I have Linux desktops, and the occasional Linux system in lab environments. I have been supporting customers with all sorts of environments that I don't get to choose for most of my career, including Linux and Windows systems. At Joyent most of our customers were running hardware virtualised Linux and Windows guests, so it's not like I haven't had a fair amount of exposure. I've even spent several days getting SCO OpenServer to run under our KVM, for a customer, because I apparently make bad life choices!
As for not discussing the social and political stuff in any depth, I felt at the time (and still do today) that so much ink had been split by all manner of folks talking about LKML or systemd project behaviour over the last decade that it was probably a distraction to do anything other than mention it in passing. As I believe I said in the podcast we did about this RFD recently: I'm not sure if this decision would be right for anybody else or not, but I believe it was and is right for us. I'm not trying to sell you, or anybody else, on making the same calls. This is just how we made our decision.
In other words, I don't think that the social or technological reasons in the document were that strong, and that's fine. Rather, my external armchair impression is simply that OS and hypervisor were not something where you were willing to spend precious "risk points", and that's the right thing to do given that you had a lot more places that were an absolute jump in the dark.
That's just fine, as long as they're not choosing a clearly inferior long term option. The technically superior solution is not always the right solution for your organization given the priorities and capabilities of your team, and that's just fine! (I have no opinion on KVM vs bhyve, I don't know either deep enough to form one. I'm talking in general.)