I mean. It's an open-source software. Those concerned can just use a patched version. Not even patched - this is fixed with a build flag - I'm sure security-oriented distributions have already specified the right one.
As a last resort, you can always block requests to 8.8.8.8 with iptables.
Those concerned may be as much or more concerned about fixing this for the masses as they are about fixing it for themselves, hard to speculate on their motivations.
It's still not a reason to harrass a maintainer who already provided a convenient override to set it to whatever one wants. Maybe Ubuntu distro is a better place to get the "safe" configuration to the masses.
It's a pretty rare phobia to be honest, and I think people who consider 8.8.8.8 a reasonable default are totally justified to. For those who don't agree there are plenty of options, that's how open source is supposed to work.
I would be more interested how much systemd made from selling its users tracking data to Google and if they didn't it would be interesting which idiot passed up a chance to secure a possibly sizeable budget increase by handing Google all that data for free. Mozilla got millions from making Google the default search and you can't tell me Google doesn't value the data it gathers from this, they have a tendency to kill under performing projects.
While it's possible for it to be patched out, the default behaviour of any application with similar scope to systemd should be to respect the users privacy. If every application required the user to "opt-out" of privacy infringing features, it would be a very time consuming and costly activity that only knowledgable users could do.
Regular users are likely to spend most of digital lives on a device fully controlled by Google, I doubt that a couple of requests to 8.8.8.8 will be a significant compromise to their privacy (how do they know that whatever they get from their provider is better by the way?).
My main point here is just that open source maintainers don't owe humanity anything - they already gave it a lot of their time. If people strongly disagree with some design decisions - and it's not a backdoor or something, it's a pretty innocent design decision to rely on a highly available DNS server as a last back up - open source gives them a lot of opportunities to do their own thing.
Unfortunately I don't find your argument to be convincing, the knowledge of such privacy concerns varies significantly amongst regular users. I don't believe they are using such software with full knowledge of their privacy-infringing features. And with every feature that evolves such default behaviour, it risks snowballing into rituals that must be performed in order to "opt-out" and done only by those knowledgeable enough.
> I doubt that a couple of requests to 8.8.8.8 will be a significant compromise to their privacy
It could be, it could be more. I don't think either of us are in a position to say exactly and likely largely depends on whether such default behaviour was changed by package maintainers in the various distributions.
> My main point here is just that open source maintainers don't owe humanity anything - they already gave it a lot of their time.
This is something we both can agree on however I tend to apply this only to those not receiving a salary for doing OSS work. I am of course not endorsing harassment or anything of the sort. People should always choose respectful conversation and debate when discussing these issues.
As a last resort, you can always block requests to 8.8.8.8 with iptables.