That's irrelevant, however. If systemd is going to ship with a default nameserver then it should be using the correct and public NTP pool, rather than servers f

That's irrelevant, however. If systemd is going to ship with a default nameserver then it should be using the correct and public NTP pool, rather than servers from a random company who hasn't made any commitment to providing reliable UTC time to a public audience. And if it's using a service like the NTP pool, it needs to have a vendor prefix. Not because this has anything at all to do with the notion of being a "distribution", but because the prefix provides a means for the pool to identify traffic originating from default-configured systemd instances, and cut it off if it suddenly starts to behave in a way that would degrade the rest of the network. Or they can simply ship with no default. But you can't have it both ways, both setting a default server and claiming not to be a vendor in every sense meaningful to an NTP server operator.