When it comes to the shutdown issue, I'd argue this is a side-effect of systemd bringing some consistency and correctness to what used to be the wild west, and

When it comes to the shutdown issue, I'd argue this is a side-effect of systemd bringing some consistency and correctness to what used to be the wild west, and is highlighting some issue that was before overlooked. Granted, in a lot of cases the issue probably wasn't a big deal (the system is being shut down, the user is already logged out, do you really care that a system background process is being shut down cleanly?) but from systemd's perspective there's no difference between that and an actually business-critical process that should absolutely be allowed to terminate cleanly before unmounting the filesystem and powering off the machine.