@Suiseiseki when the layperson talks about the three major desktop OSes it's gonna be windows, macOS and Linux (or just the major server OS). That's what the shitfit was about. Something heavily relying on GNU tools at the time got popular, it wasn't named GNU so the GNU project insisted it had to be prefixed to the name so they would seem more relevant.

No OS since the early-to-mid 2000s has been just the coreutils anyway. Most practical desktop OSes have been mostly their DEs like KDE and Gnome. Calling it KDE/Linux is just as appropriate as GNU/Linux, yet the KDE people didn't mobilize an army of reply guys to tell you why it's GNU/Linux.