More precisely, systemd nowadays expects fsck on reboot to be forced with fsck.mode=force kernel command line argument instead of creating the /forcefsck file. But it is nasty (no genetic method) to add kernel command line arguments in general and it is president, so would need to be removed again after reboot. This would require us to implement a complex method to add the kernel command line argument, specific for the individual SBC model and kernel implementation, still not assured to work with custom kernels or images, then create a flag file, check it on boot to remove the argument again. Creating the /forcefsck file on the other hand is trivial, still works on all hardware models and kernel implementation the same way and is automatically removed by systemd on boot, to be a one time action. It is a shame that this method got deprecated without any similarly simple and genetic replacement.