The standard framing defines the Gaussian as this special object with a nice PDF, then presents the CLT as a surprising property it happens to have. But convolution of densities is the fundamental operation. If you keep convolving any finite-variance distribution with itself, the shape converges, and we called the limit "normal." The Gaussian is a fixed point of iterated convolution under √n rescaling. It earned its name by being the thing you inevitably get, not by having elegant closed-form properties.

The most interesting assumptions to relax are the independence assumptions. They're way more permissive than the textbook version suggests. You need dependence to decay fast enough, and mixing conditions (α-mixing, strong mixing) give you exactly that: correlations that die off let the CLT go through essentially unchanged. Where it genuinely breaks is long-range dependence -fractionally integrated processes, Hurst parameter above 0.5, where autocorrelations decay hyperbolically instead of exponentially. There the √n normalization is wrong, you get different scaling exponents, and sometimes non-Gaussian limits.

There are also interesting higher order terms. The √n is specifically the rate that zeroes out the higher-order cumulants. Skewness (third cumulant) decays at 1/√n, excess kurtosis at 1/n, and so on up. Edgeworth expansions formalize this as an asymptotic series in powers of 1/√n with cumulant-dependent coefficients. So the Gaussian is the leading term of that expansion, and Edgeworth tells you the rate and structure of convergence to it.