So I played around with this a bit more on a Fedora 30 VM running kernel 5.5.10-100.fc30.
There is a zfs.conf file in /lib/modules-load.d/ zfs.conf. The contents of the file are as follows:
# The default behavior is to allow udev to load the kernel modules on demand.
** # Uncomment the following line to unconditionally load them at boot.**
** #zfs**
Un-commenting the #zfs line seems to load the modules. This has to mean that systemd is failing somewhere in the process, no? I still see failures if I journalctl | grep zfs yet I also get expected results for zfs list and zpool list
any ideas?