When I was being interviewed, we did talk about exactly this, including that libsystemd is a kitchen sink, and that eventually OpenSSH went with open-coding the equivalent to sd_notify instead of depending on libsystemd. (Also that ahem Red Hat added the dependency on libsystemd in a downstream patch oops).

However the editors (correctly IMHO) took the decision to simplify the whole story of dependencies. In an early draft they simplified it too much, sort of implying that sshd depended directly on liblzma, but they corrected that (adding the illustration of dependencies) after I pointed out it was inaccurate.

I agree with everything you say, but you have to pick your battles when explaining very complicated topics like shared libraries to a lay audience.

In general I was impressed by their careful fact checking and attention to detail.

Sadly they missed the misspelling (UNRESOVLED) even though I pointed it out last week :-( But that's literally the only thing they didn't fix after my feedback.