That may be true for desktops, but on a server, you can still run a very clean system. My virtual server has 16 processes running on it, six of them "systemd-something".
Well done! I am mostly referring to the 'bracket' kernel thread processes, which were not there back in the day. I must admit some laziness here, as I could research these in just a few minutes.
I avoid Gnome and KDE for that reason: they involve too many processes.