I strongly suspect that at this point most people will in fact have one of the several tools that preceded kmscon by some years and are still around: zhcon (http://zhcon.sourceforge.net/), jfbterm (http://jfbterm.sourceforge.jp/), fbterm (https://code.google.com/p/fbterm/), yaft (https://github.com/uobikiemukot/yaft), fbpad (http://repo.or.cz/w/fbpad.git), and so forth.
A userspace replacement entitled kmscon has already been around since 2012, by David Herrmann. It's a totally separate project.
consoled is a minimalistic fallback done by the same person. I'm not sure if it really needs to exist, but replacing CONFIG_VT in of itself isn't bad. Most people will probably still have kmscon primarily.