Well, you certainly have a point, but I'm not sure you're right or not. Pointing to a library instead of protocol isn't some recent fad. Say, this was the case

Well, you certainly have a point, but I'm not sure you're right or not. Pointing to a library instead of protocol isn't some recent fad. Say, this was the case with ALSA/libalsa. I guess OSS folks had ranted, yet ALSA is what we've ended with. So, it's certainly not something related to webapps and proprietary APIs. Well, I think in 2000s everyone who had some relation to FLOSS just hated such things. Microsoft's stuff had been a pain in the ass, probably more than they are now. Although, the webapp trend may have had influenced overall mentality with "aw, just link to this and you're good." Some sites, notably, Mega, had even switched to that model from a previous API-first approaches. There are also cases where implementation-first approach has worked well, though. For example SQLite - while most users just link to the library, the format is well-documented, thought out and is quite sane. So, systemd can recover. I'm not keeping myself up-to-date with news on that, but I think I've heard (maybe, incorrectly, though) there are some efforts in that direction. Just my thoughts on this.