I don't understand the uproar. Systemd isn't perfect but it gets so much hate for the value it provides
Those are also just fields, and there's incoming laws in countries that target them. No internet for unsupervised women for example. You wouldn't want to break usability for the fine government servants of Afghanistan would you?
“What if instead of a user agent string, HTTP headers contained a string of your DNA, or a count of all the women that’ve ever rejected you for trying to get them to install Gentoo?”. Time to boycott web browsers I guess! even though none of it is mandatory! You’re really asking for someone to condescendingly send you the Wikipedia page for the slippery slope fallacy. I’m not going to be the one to do it, but I came close.
Systemd is doing just that and calling everyone who disagrees with them fascist.
Do you feel like systemd has been collecting your PII since 2020? If so, you have only yourself to blame, since it only stores what the user types in and nothing more. Birth date is exactly the same. Type some nonsense in that field if you like, or leave it blank.
I don't know, I use Open BSD.
The gecos field normally contains comma separated subfields as follows:
name User's full name.
office User's office location.
wphone User's work phone number.
hphone User's home phone number.
Maybe one day you'll switch to a freedom respecting OS.