- The Linux kernel also has timer coalescing
- Linux also has lazy atime ('relatime') by default
- No Linux distro installs uucp by default, and certainly not suid
- Desktop distros will also run a file indexer of some sort
etc.
First, Linux was never GNU - the GNU ecosystem has always been a significant part, but if you were obstinate enough, you could get away without using any GNU tools (which is even easier today).
Second, you give just two examples. A few years ago we had a trend to rewrite everything in Rust with these newer tools usually not being part of the GNU project. Sure, you can replace everything now. However, most GNU tools are here to stay for a long time especially in enterprise distros where backward compatibility is important.
So no, Linux has never been GNU, and whatever fluctuations we had over decades with innumerable fights like egcs vs gcc etc., the GNU ecosystem is and will long be part of Linux distros.
25 years ago it was reasonable to say the typical Linux machine was “gnu/linux”. Today it’s not.
So legally at one point a Linux was Unix.
They were:
Inspur K-UX (expired on 3 February 2019)
Huawei EulerOS (expired in September 2022)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspur_K-UX
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EulerOS
These were both based on Red Hat.