Systemd has managed mount points on systems where it runs for a long time. It provides mount units an alternative to fstab mount directives, which offers some a

Systemd has managed mount points on systems where it runs for a long time. It provides mount units an alternative to fstab mount directives, which offers some advantages (including parallelism of at-boot mounting, granular mount dependencies for services, automatic runtime mounting and unmounting) and disadvantages (harder to view at a glance than fstab, more complex). What’s more, on systemd systems, fstab is dynamically converted into native systemd mount units at boot, so in many cases fstab is purely a facade/compatibility shim over systemd doing all the mounting anyway. While not terribly prescriptive, “man systemd.mount” recommends /etc/fstab be used to manage “mounts for humans” due to its simplicity and accessibility. So it doesn’t seem like fstab is considered legacy or deprecated by systemd; rather, this seems like more of a porcelain/plumbing distinction.