Where would I find details about this situation in the PG docs?.
As far as PostgreSQL is concerned if startup fails it tries to log that fact then stops. If doesn’t care whether it’s being started by hand, via systemd, or even cron, and it is out of scope for the server documentation to cover such things. Whomever wrote the systemd stuff for your O/S platform will hopefully have documented such things, otherwise I would advise to inspect the configuration files themselves.
David J.
