> But on a normative level, perhaps a project that doesn’t want to support users shouldn’t have subsumed a huge swath of user land things?

It's not that the project doesn't want to support users in some absolute sense, it just doesn't want it happening in github issues.

The project provides the systemd-devel mailing list for that, but it's still preferred that users stuck on old versions determined by their distro's release cadence seek support from their distro vendor. It's likely such slow-moving distros are patching their LTS versions anyways, and are best positioned to support what they ship.