While its possible to find or build a distro without systemd, most of the big names that you would introduce people to use it:
Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Fedora, OpenSUSE
Hell, Arch uses it
I do get your point about GNOME, and I don’t use a DE anymore so I might be outdated, but Gnome and KDE were the big two back when I used it.
I say obfuscates because gnome configuration is now largely binary, whereas gnome2 used to be text files. The same goes for systemd- the logs are now binary files with journalctl instead of text files