I think the feature exists primarily because there is quite a lot of flaky software out there that gets „miraculously cured” with a restart. Not having to nanny

I think the feature exists primarily because there is quite a lot of flaky software out there that gets „miraculously cured” with a restart. Not having to nanny them until a proper fix is a boon, especially when you know the proper fix isn’t coming ever, or is not possible. That said, there exist options to determine that restarts are happening too quickly, indicative of a misconfiguration or that it just won’t work, period. See Timeout*. If this is not what you want, you can always change the restart policy, or specify the maximum number of restarts. Could be, though, that some software ships with crappy defaults which make it crash all the time and systemd just always restarting it and reporting everything is ok. Not a problem of systemd per se, though.