People who say these things about X11 and anything non-systemd sound like out of touch newcomers unaware of the BSDs or mainline Linux distributions that haven't gone along with Red Hat's directions. There is really no issue with X11 that isn't solved with a few options set to the X executable or using something other than startx to initialize, but I think OpenBSD made the right call just forking it.

Every single thing under the Sun going into systemd is going to cause issues (and probably already has with age verification laws and such) with compliance where a company is a singular target (Red Hat under IBM) to compel to make undesired changes contrary to our interests as users.

Red Hat is probably an even bigger problem than GNOME.

On the topic of WMs, some of these classics are really great. Openbox is a favorite of mine among the floating, but bspwm has been my overall favorite for 11 years.