Seems that some leftovers from System V still reside in YOCTO... Correct???

Not sure about that. 

The problem I faced was because there was a sshd.socket that had the following line in it. The sshd.socket comes with openssh. 

Conflicts=sshd.service

So I had two options. either to add the ExecStartPre in the sshd.service file or to remove the Conflicts line in sshd.socket. 

I choose to remove the Conflicts line and add the following in the sshd.socket file.

After=network.target
Before=sshd.service

Thanks and Regards,
-=Srijan Nandi