I suspect the 'goodness' or the 'badness' of the patch is contained in what init does when it misses notifies. Clearly the kernel has dropped some on the floor as it ran out of space, and it tells you this. What libnih does is then scream and shout and abort (which is a fine first configuration since you don't know how common this will be) but when you discover it does happen, you consider ignoring it, if the error is idempotent. Meaning of course if you ignore it, do you later get a notify when the kernel has more notify buffers to use? To understand that you need to read the notify code in the kernel so see how it is generating notifications.

If the kernel drops and never returns a notification, then init has to know that it missed some in order to operate under the correct set of init files. That requires a combination patch to init and to libnih.

If the kernel gets around to notifying anyway, just more slowly, then you can safely ignore it, init will eventually get the message the 'regular' way and you're done.

Given the bug, the next step might be to see if systemd suffers a similar challenge in the presence of a lot of config changes.