you can stop and start it via systemctl and systemd is going to make mounts for fstab entries automatically, I just put local drives in my fstab so that way I can copy mount files between machines

With these systemd mount files I don’t need to touch the fstab, I can use ansible to copy the file, enable the service then start it. I can also have other services like Docker, Jellyfin or whatever to depend on that service. If the nfs share can’t be mounted then systemd won’t try to start docker.

Systemd can retry mounting based on the restart policy in case you have an interruption.