Turning that on its head, if you removed all of userspace and just left the kernel, would it be truthful to call what remains Linux? I'd say in common parlance that is what's called "the Linux kernel", and what people mean when they say Linux more thoroughly refers to the work of distributions than it has anything to do with the kernel
Linux of the early 00s was popularized on a platform of "Linux is about freedom, Linux is about choice". At least one half of that is entirely due to the distributions.
From a programmer's perspective, you are writing a program which interacts with the world by making system calls to the kernel. So the kernel is fundamentally more relevant than the fact that the system is running Wayland and comes with LibreOffice.
Linux of the early 00s was popularized on a platform of "Linux is about freedom, Linux is about choice". At least one half of that is entirely due to the distributions.