it's the "usually" that's the problem

this service (untouched by me) had:

After=local-fs.target network-online.target remote-fs.target time-sync.target

but it was still started without an IP address, and then failed to bind

just like this sort of problem: https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/4880#issuecomment-...

the entire thing is unreliable and doesn't act like you'd expect

> Or you can do something with ExecStartPre. You could run a shell command that checks for the most recent time sync or forces one.

at that point I might as well go back to init=/etc/rc