He doesn't seem to see a difference between "merely" having to reinstall the OS and restore from backups, and a machine that can't boot any OS anymore? And he's apparently a "senior software engineer" at RedHat?
It doesn't even matter if you're pro or anti-systemd. That sort of response just shows a huge lack of understanding about the severity of the problem.
I have also seen him brush away the difference between su and su -l, claiming that su was fundamentally broken and that we should instead ssh into localhost.
Then let the distro handle it. If your users are bricking machines, mount efivars read-only. (This is trivially done even when systemd is hard coded to mount it read/write).
It doesn't even matter if you're pro or anti-systemd. That sort of response just shows a huge lack of understanding about the severity of the problem.