It's a systemd thing, see `man systemd-tmpfiles`.
It was available as an option before that: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man5/rcS.5.html
I think that superkuh's point is that it is not a systemd thing. Cleaning up /tmp by deleting old files has been around since before systemd was invented. Since before Linux was invented, even.
It was available as an option before that: https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/xenial/man5/rcS.5.html