It's completely reasonable to turn it on. And also, when you're writing applications for Linux, consider using the `O_NOATIME` flag in your file opens.
MOUNT(8)
relatime
Update inode access times relative to modify or change time. Access time is only updated if the previous access time was earlier than or equal to the current
modify or change time. (Similar to noatime, but it doesn’t break mutt(1) or other applications that need to know if a file has been read since the last time it
was modified.)
Since Linux 2.6.30, the kernel defaults to the behavior provided by this option (unless noatime was specified), and the strictatime option is required to
obtain traditional semantics. In addition, since Linux 2.6.30, the file’s last access time is always updated if it is more than 1 day old.Maybe if you could taint a process (or perhaps the inode and/or path instead) so that its and its children's opens get the new o_atime flag by default, so that systemd or whatever could set it for legacy processes (or files/paths) that need it.
Then distros or SRE's could put up with it without nagging all the SWEs about linuxisms. Some of whom may not know or care their code runs on linux.