I heard that Gnome is dependent on systemd now.

> Snap and flatpak are essentially just package managers, I can't see why you would expect those to be worse than any other package manager.

Those are even worse than tarball bundles. Main purpose of both overengineered projects is to tie users to vendor's services (snapcraft, flathub, e.t.c.). Centralized delivery is outmoded, future is decentralized distributed distribution. Both package managers deprive me of control over my system. I don't like the aggressiveness with which these projects are enforced. When Let's Encrypt switched to Spat as the only official distribution of their tool, I had to switch to alternative tool acme.sh instead of installing bloated snapd on my server.