[nickik]

> as a hard dependency of GNOME to force distros to adopt systemd

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.