> Well, this boils down to: in a modern operating system, is it good design that an unprivileged user who logs in once can consume arbitrary runtime resources uncontrolled, unbounded forever, even after logout just because they decided to mask SIGHUP?

This was well known and accounted for where necessary. You considered everyone else to be wrong about the issue and went ahead and fixed it according to your opinion. Don't be surprised that a considerable portion of "everyone" doesn't agree with you.