I'm not going to listen to a 1.5 hour podcast to find the exact quote, but someone must've misspoke or misunderstood. I did some searching in the meantime, but there's no evidence at all of "Jia Tan" interacting with the systemd developers. They pressured distributions to update xz-utils, but not systemd upstream.
That may be true, but that wasn't the claim. The claim was changes in upstream systemd would limit the timeline for them. Not that they had interaction with each other.
