Comment by surajrmal

What's interesting here isn't a strict dependency on systemd, but dependencies on some APIs it provides. Given the ability and existence of things which implement those APIs outside of systemd, it's worth considering that the APIs themselves should be the focus. Perhaps they should be spun out of systemd itself. It seems sensible to that gnome would want to move to a better API which is almost defacto a standard these days anyways. Versioning the API and allowing more folks outside of the systemd organization to participate in its continued evolution should be the focus imo.