Compiling std.typecons with the switch "debug=RefCounted" enables debugging functions which call writeln, but there are no imports to stdio. Now, in my case the CairoD library uses the debug=RefCounted switch to enable its own debugging methods. As a result, building a CairoD project via e.g. xfbuild will fail, because xfbuild *manually* compiles phobos modules and propagates that debug switch. So std.typecons ends up getting the switch, and there are writeln() calls everywhere enabled by it but no imports to std.stdio. In short, std.typecons.d needs to be fixed!
Seems to be fixed in 2.057.