To be fair I can't blame the author. The why part probably doesn't exist because he wrote it for himself, or, he wrote it for people who he knows and would be able to seperate what advice to follow for their use-case.
This is just an assumption on my part, but I feel like he just wrote down a list of what he has followed down in the past. He didn't write down the "why" because he wrote it in context of his own experiences.
Like that systemd portion looks very icky, but when you have the disclaimer in context. You'd want to go to something with the least amount of attack surface. Systemd is a giant project, and a very useful one at that, and for context I am firm supporter of systemd, but I can see why he'd put that in the guide, since his disclaimer says the guide isn't really about usability but minimizing the attack surface.
In turn it got submitted to hackernews by someone who read their article, and unfortunately some people would treat it as gospel and turn off their brains, since as you mentioned there's no "Why?", but it makes sense to not include it if he didn't really write it for the masses but just to document something for himself and his friends/colleagues.
We need to be better at being suspicious about any information. And do our own research and experimentation. But who has the time for that in this day and era when information is expected to be received by push notification and most people can't comprehend messages longer then an SMS.
This is just an assumption on my part, but I feel like he just wrote down a list of what he has followed down in the past. He didn't write down the "why" because he wrote it in context of his own experiences.
Like that systemd portion looks very icky, but when you have the disclaimer in context. You'd want to go to something with the least amount of attack surface. Systemd is a giant project, and a very useful one at that, and for context I am firm supporter of systemd, but I can see why he'd put that in the guide, since his disclaimer says the guide isn't really about usability but minimizing the attack surface.
In turn it got submitted to hackernews by someone who read their article, and unfortunately some people would treat it as gospel and turn off their brains, since as you mentioned there's no "Why?", but it makes sense to not include it if he didn't really write it for the masses but just to document something for himself and his friends/colleagues.