Comment by tadfisher

Debian did not link OpenSSH with a 1.5 million-line library, because one doesn't exist. The library is libsystemd, which is comparatively tiny, and it is tiny so that sane things like Type=notify services get supported in more places with less pushback.

Yes, it could be smaller, broken up to remove compression support [0], what have you. But you should criticize the things that are actually problems, not some made-up bullshit about the whole of systemd being linked into everything that talks to it.

0: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/32028