Have you tried `sudo loginctl enable-linger [username]`? This used to be well-documented, but I don't see much about it now. It's possible things have changed since the last time I had to deal with this?
> Enable/disable user lingering for one or more users. If enabled for a specific user, a user manager is spawned for the user at boot and kept around after logouts. This allows users who are not logged in to run long-running services. Takes one or more user names or numeric UIDs as argument. If no argument is specified, enables/disables lingering for the user of the session of the caller. See also KillUserProcesses= setting in logind.conf(5).
Mainly I meant that I no longer see it recommended on the Arch wiki, which I think is where I first learned it. But it looks like that might be because Arch now compiles systemd with lingering on by default (or something similar to that, I'm probably using the wrong term).
Linger does more than just keeping the session open after logout. It also means that the session gets started automatically on boot, which is necessary if you want to have systemd units for that user autostart. Case in point, the PulseAudio setup on my homeserver: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/2f93ff...
