Thankfully, sanity eventually did prevail in GNOME (just related to this matter, not in general), but there was a period of time where systemd absolutely was a hard dependency,
I'm not sure what period you're alluding to, but if that did happen, it seems it happened because things stalled on the BSD side, not because of any changes in GNOME. Can you please elaborate what you mean? I'm interested to get a BSD developer's view of the history, but I've only seen a few vague blog posts on this matter.
