I recently redid my Arch install and I'm mounting usb drives on a user account thats just in the wheel group no problem with pretty much any filesystem (ufs, ntfs, fat32, btrfs, ext4, f2fs).

I agree that the rewrites all the time were annoying, but I have a hard time seeing systemd developers rewriting the same part of their project over and over now. For better or worse systemd should at least slow churn.