The whole GNU thing has always came off as butthurt from RMS since Linux got all the glory while he and his team of contributors shit the bed on the Hurd kernel.
Let’s not forget that X.org + all the desktop environments which are very important parts of a functioning OS are not GNU projects either. At what point do we need to say GNU+X11+KDE+Linux?
All I know is if you say that machine over there runs Linux, I know what you’re talking about.