The lasting damage was knowing it could happen at all: that a single contributor with no stated organizational backing could submit compliance infrastructure for surveillance law directly into the software that boots your computer, get it merged by two Microsoft employees, and have the creator of systemd personally block the removal.

The systemd PR was merged by Luca Boccassi, a systemd maintainer who works for Microsoft. Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd who spent years at Red Hat before joining Microsoft in 2022, had just left Microsoft to found a new startup weeks before the merge, but he has remained active in systemd development.

The most powerful gatekeeper for the init system that boots most Linux machines is employed by a company with significant commercial interest in OS-level identity infrastructure becoming normalized. He let the PR through.