> The whole reason everybody got stuck with systemd is because Gnome wouldn't run without it. Every distribution had a choice of getting rid of Gnome or moving to systemd.

They haven't made it easy to run GNOME Shell without systemd, but people have got it working in Gentoo, Void etc., see, for instance: https://dm.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/66ass2/update_void_li...

(That said, I don't run GNOME Shell on any of my machines.)