Gnome does not depend on systemd. But if you want to be able to shutdown/suspend/... your computer you need logind running[*]. With the recent work on systemd cgroup support logind NEEDS systemd as init. Of course you always can write your own logind-service, but that would definitely be a lot of work. So as long as nobody comes up with a logind-replacement it is true that gnome depends on systemd.
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