I think this discussion is moving in the wrong direction or least one which won't help people not using some Linux distribution.

The use case here is very similar to the hash seed randomization which was also successfully handled using an environment variable setting, so why not do the same here ?

I don't really understand the objections mentioned against env vars. They can be set per process, per user, even globally and they are under control by whoever runs an application.

Note that this is about breaking backwards compatibility badly. Certificate verification is a good thing, but if it results in people no longer being able to easily upgrade to a new patch level release, something is wrong. If such a feature causes applications to fail working, admins won't go in a fix the application; instead they'll simply not upgrade to 2.7.9+, cutting people off of all the other fixes in 2.7.9+.