I would have added this as a comment to the accepted answer, but I lack the needed reputation. As @kaiserkaiser suggested, the trailing slash is unneeded but without specifying mysql as the database mariadb complains about a missing database. I found that
$ mysql_tzinfo_to_sql /usr/share/zoneinfo | mysql -u root -p -Dmysql
was the correct way to solve the problem in Mariadb 164.