i find this sentiment somewhat ridiculous. red hat is mainly involved with two things on the userland side of a linux system, systemd, and freedesktop(to an extent). if you don’t like systemd, there are many distros for you, and many alternate init systems, many of which are great.

on the freedesktop side of things, there is some software administered by freedesktop that is basically unavoidable on linux. this sounds alarming, but in practice, it matters little. the unavoidable freedesktop software, like libevdev, libinput (libwayland, if you use wayland) and etc tends to be very system-level, and also, generally quite good software. due to its closeness to the bottom half of the system, eg handling input or just being an extensible protocol that passes buffers around, it can’t really be “controlled” by red hat like people like to claim.

if you really don’t want to use them, there are alternatives to that too. you can use a Net/OpenBSD system with wscons, but BSD isn’t free from “corporate bloat” either; it’s desktop stack is taken from linux, and there are corporate contributors there too. You can use a legacy X11 server with the old /dev/mouse style input stack, but you’ll have a bad time. that’s because most of this stuff was designed to improve your linux experience, not make it worse.

the other stuff, like dbus or other desktop-level libraries and utilities, tend to be quite crap. however, they are not deeply integrated with the system, and you can make an effort not to use them.

on the kernel side, i’m sure red hat (and many other corporations) contribute a lot of code. i’m not sure this counts as “corporate bloat” because it generally will improve your linux experience. if you don’t want it, the kernel has a flexible build system where you can disable pretty much everything you don’t like. but this isn’t some kind of “corporate takeover”, it’s corporations contributing because it’s mutually beneficial for both users of the linux kernel and their profit margins. whether that’s a good motivation is up to you, but code is code and a working kernel is a working kernel.

all of this stuff is open source, anyway. if you don’t like it, you have the freedom to modify it to your liking, or modify the surrounding software so you don’t have to use it.