dereferencing undefined variables (as a test to see whether they are
assigned or not) is considered standard practice in bash scripting.
There are many, many scripts in debian that use this feature; running
your system with set -u will BREAK these scripts so they will not
function properly. This is because [ -z $foo ] should return 0 (success)
if $foo is unassigned, however if you set -u then it returns 1 (failure).
To get an idea of how many scripts on your system will break when you
run them with set -u, you can do a quick grepping:
grep -I ' -z ' /bin/* /usr/bin/*
So don't use set -u, unless you are actively debugging a script that you
are writing (that is what it's for.)
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