Why?

genext2fs is slow. It has O(n^2) behaviour, which becomes annoying with
larger filesystems. It also creates an ext2 image and we have to upgrade
it to ext4 in multiple steps. Even then, the image has an inode size of
128, which is incompatible with 2038 and does not allow storing
sub-second precision time stamps.

How?

We use mkfs.ext4 from e2fsprogs (which is required anyway) instead.
Running this from within a --customize-hook does not work, because the
user namespace used for the hook often has no privileges to write to the
output image. Instead, we now ask mmdebstrap to output to a directory
and create the filesystem separately. We construct a special namespace
that has both access to the tree and to the output image and perform the
mkfs.ext4 there. As a consequence, we no longer support any mode but
unshare and since mkfs.ext4 consumes the size parameter, the size syntax
is reduced a bit.