The parent mentions systemd-resolved and you mention systemd-homed. Most distros that use systemd don't use either by default.

IIRC the required parts of systemd are pretty much init-related, service-related (as in starting/stopping services based on certain conditions), udev and journald (which can and is often defaulted to forward to syslog).

Comments like yours make it seem like resolved, homed, nspawn, machinectl, networkd, cgtop, and all of the other utilites and optional daemons are required. They seem more like konquerour in your KDE analogy as in that they are nice if you want to buy into the whole ecosystem but by no means required to use the core program (and many seem to use alternatives instead).

I'm by no means an expert on this, so please correct me if I'm wrong.