> if a system component like Gnome is crashing, there will be neither log records or crash dumps and you will never figure out why it crashed

On Fedora you can use ABRT (AKA Problem Reporting) to view logs and tracebacks of a component that has crashed, and report the problem via Bugzilla. Also, GNOME isn't a system component, Fedora would still work without it, but it would use a TTY terminal instead.