> packages like GNOME and soon KDE's Plasma are building in requirements that require capabilities in systemd

So drop them. There are other desktops that are faster, simpler, more stable, and aren't hard-coded to make Linux worse. Has everyone forgotten the design principles that made Linux good in the first place? Tightly coupling your software into other software is simply bad design. At some point you need to eat the cost of a looser abstraction to make your system less fragile, easier to reason about, and more compatible.