I can confirm that with the latest bionic packages (zfsutils-linux 0.7.5-1ubuntu4) all units start successfully for the case where no ZFS pools are present. This is exactly as I would expect.
I can't really speak to the discussion about tainted kernel. If I didn't want ZFS, I wouldn't install zfsutils-linux, so I think it's a reasonable expectation as-is.
I can confirm that with the latest bionic packages (zfsutils-linux 0.7.5-1ubuntu4) all units start successfully for the case where no ZFS pools are present. This is exactly as I would expect.
I can't really speak to the discussion about tainted kernel. If I didn't want ZFS, I wouldn't install zfsutils-linux, so I think it's a reasonable expectation as-is.