Hi Peter and Toby! The issues about systemd are potentially fixed in https://salsa.debian.org/mariadb-team/mariadb-server/-/merge_requests/29
Please test it (you can download the .deb packages from the pipeline build artifacts (https://salsa.debian.org/otto/mariadb-server/-/pipelines/628913) and let me know how it went. If I get validation that it works now, I will upload this to Debian and make the bugs you reported as fixed. Thanks!