A gentoo dev actually showed that GNOME can work without systemd. The gentoo wiki explained it.

I never tested this myself, as I also dislike GNOME3 from a UI view (I am fine with mate-desktop though), but I found this to be epic from the Gentoo folks - a single man flipping a finger to the systemd devs. The underdog winning the fight.

A shame gentoo kind of went into its own hole for years ...