I agree that such a flag would be useful, too, in which case the systemd folks could very well have consulted with the kernel folks in advance to work out a deprecation path for the kernel-only behavior and an introduction path for a generic behavior that activates the respective kernel-specific and systemd-specific flags.
The problem is that such collaboration didn't happen, and the systemd folks assumed that they were the center of the universe and decided "well fuck the kernel, we're going to use the 'debug' flag for ourselves, everything else be damned", thus causing breakage and flamewars. Had they taken the 10 seconds to write up an email on LKML or somesuch saying "hey, we think the 'debug' flag should apply to everything, not just the kernel; y'all game?", the vast majority of the fallout would have never existed.
> the systemd folks assumed that they were the center of the universe and decided "well fuck the kernel, we're going to use the 'debug' flag for ourselves, everything else be damned"
Note that even Linus said that "parsing [the 'debug' and 'quiet' flag] and doing something sane with them is not a bug, it's a feature". So the issue revolved on what people believe is "sane", not about userspace using kernel bootparams (systemd still does and Linus is ok with it). The systemd folks argued that the kernel should not affected if something broke and started throwing too many messages at it during early boot (indeed, the kernel was fixed to rate limit in those cases). The kernel people instead said that it's not ok for userspace to flood the kernel, not even in broken setups (indeed, systemd was fixed to stop sending messages to dmesg as soon as journald is up).
I believe that sending emails here and there to ask "it's ok to do that?" would not work. LKML is already high traffic as is, such messages would just get ignored until things break.
The problem is that such collaboration didn't happen, and the systemd folks assumed that they were the center of the universe and decided "well fuck the kernel, we're going to use the 'debug' flag for ourselves, everything else be damned", thus causing breakage and flamewars. Had they taken the 10 seconds to write up an email on LKML or somesuch saying "hey, we think the 'debug' flag should apply to everything, not just the kernel; y'all game?", the vast majority of the fallout would have never existed.