I don't on my personal laptop, but my workplace's wacky automation does on my work laptop, and school and library automation definitely does on shared workstations, including laptops.

I get that that's the problem of the automation, not the daemon, but I'm curious about who exactly is representing users when the people running a project state things like that so unequivocally, and if those users are just excluded from any benefits from a system like this because fuck 'em.

Well he is 'reinventing' home directories as an independent concept. This storage artifact could be updated frequently and over the network. The concern may be insignifcant until this homed feature has its limits stretched.