Sounds like you had junior admins at best leading your university's *NIX department.
A mid-level admin in 1995 could have easily made a 100 line script to kill background processes from non-logged in users that were running over three hours (or whatever).
I don't understand this angle. You acknowledge the functionality could have been useful even 25 years ago; it makes perfect sense for a daemon developer to integrate the functionality into a session manager and put it behind a config flag which is exactly what they did.
But that’s such a useless definition because then all software “provides nothing” since it’s implementation proves that you could have written it yourself.
logind is far more robust than any of the janky shell scripts
I’ve seen over the years to accomplish this.
