Actually the Windows blue screen is a really good feature, and was even more useful before they removed some info it displays.
I think you make a good point, in that the BSOD is synonymous with Windows' general unreliability in popular culture, but a screen which displays an error message, to assist with diagnostics, isn't a bad thing. Don't shoot the messenger.
But as it progressed to puerile messages such as "something stopped working" or whatever, it became more of a useless annoyance.
Microsoft reacted to, what I would call, the "hysteria" over the BSOD messages and in Windows XP (If I recall correctly, though may have been 2000), added and enabled by default, an option to just silently reboot when any crash that would trigger one would occur. In my opinion this was worse.
To be clear though, I think Poettering will ape whatever Microsoft or Apple do regardless. Gnome project are similar, in that they implemented a registry (dconf) and the goal of the desktop is to prevent customisation. They also added "stopped working" style pop up errors at some point, which leads us to conclude that gnome is very much developed as a consumer product.
gnome integrated systemd early on and its developers don't regard any bugs which manifest without systemd installed as bugs and are now the main driving force pushing wayland, which many feel isn't mature enough yet. Without the "entanglement" in projects like gnome or KDE, systemd adoption in Linux would be nowhere near as advanced as it is today - I feel they will use the same strategy with Wayland in their haste to put X.org behind them and move everyone forcibly to the half working solution - then try to fix the thing.
So a BSOD feature in my view is just a symptom of what's going on with these projects.
To these people they are the developers of the "Linux OS" and everyone and everything else is just irrelevant.
arstechnica.com
