Of course gimbal lock is a thing, and there are ways to avoid it, even without quaternions, but I'm curious as to when it should be avoided. I think that gamers are now so used to it, that removing it might cause more problems than it solves
I also think, despite various sources on the internet saying "quaternions are the solution to gimbal lock", that classical 3D vectors and 3D matrices without quaternions also perfectly solve it.