LxQt and any KDE-powered distro would beg to differ.
But I agree, in general, that KDE-default distros are few and far between. And the KDE team probably has better things to do with their time than try to maintain a systemd-less fork.
KDE has long been a more crossplatform system than Gnome (much better windows support (and even e.g. solaris), BSD is treated as first-class) so I'd hope they'll continue to avoid being systemd-dependent.
Based on what?
cough cough Slackware cough cough Kubuntu/Xubuntu/Lubuntu cough cough Tiny Core Linux cough cough the literal dozens if not hundreds of distros that ship with a desktop environment that's not GNOME or MATE or Cinnamon or some other derivation thereof cough cough cough
Or because they like systemd and they think the abstractions it provides are useful and its better to not have that code in GNOME. But sure, lets go with the conspiracy angle.
Also, pure serve distros also adopted systemd.
> Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly.
OpenSource project not implementing the features some users want them to implement. Shocking stuff. Its almost as if that's the bases of Open Source. If you don't like the choices of the project you can take the source and do your own thing.
Those distros that can run without systemd have to make their own patches to "fix" GNOME, which is very costly. Even Gentoo struggles with that, as it takes them a long time to release new versions of GNOME because they have to write the patches to strip out systemd first.