But these days does Gnu play any real role in Linux?
I could certainly understand the name being Linux/systemd rather than Gnu/Linux because for many distros systemd plays such a large role it can almost be said to be much of the operating system.
Systemd plays a demonstrably critical role in Linux, whereas….. what does Gnu do? What is the Gnu part of Gnu/Linux?
If you want to see what GNU has been up to, including a recent release of binutils, you can check their blog [0].
Very little of it is irreplaceable these days. You could use a different shell. You can even run a BSD userland under a Linux kernel, in theory. The Linux kernel itself is replaceable with e.g. the open sourced Solaris kernel. There's many alternatives to just about any major UNIX component these days. But the standard (and often the only fully supported) set of tools and libraries on Linux is heavily GNU.
Emacs, for those of us that can't put up with vi?
Bash: popular command line shell
Binutils: tools for creating executable binaries including GNU ld, the linker, and GNU as, the assembler.
Bison: widely-used parser generator; used to create parsers for programming languages
CLISP: GNU implementation of Common Lisp programming language
Coreutils: command line programs that implement large parts of the POSIX operating system standards
Diffutils: provide diff, cmp, diff3, and sdiff utilities used to compare files and see their differences
Emacs: powerful and extensible text editor
fdisk: used to create disk partitions
Findutils: includes find, locate, updatedb, and xargs command line programs
Fontutils: programs for managing fonts
Gawk: GNU implementation of AWK programming language
GCC: the GNU Compiler Collection: GNU implmentations of C, C++, Objective-C, Fortran, Java, Ada, and Go. Probably most widely used set of tools in this list. The Linux kernel was originally developed using GCC and, for a while, could only be compiled with GCC.
GDB: the GNU debugger; used to debug programs.
Gettext: provides programming support text output in multiple human languages
Ghostscript: GNU Postscript interpreter and PDF file support
GIMP: image / graphics editing program
GMP: arbitrary precision math libraries used in scientific computing
GnuCOBOL: GNU implementation of COBOL programming language
GnuPG: GNU Privacy Guard, an implementation of the OpenPGP cryptography standard
GnuTLS: library that implements SSL, TLS, and DTLS cryptography protocols
GRUB: bootloader that starts most Linux distributions
glibc: GNU implementation of the C standard library
GLS: the GNU Scientific Library for numerical analysis and scientific computing
Guile: GNU implementation of Scheme programming language for use as a universal application plugin / extension system
Guix: GNU package management system based on Nix
Gzip: data compression and decompression
less: GNU pager implementation
Libtool: library for creating consistent and portable shared programming libraries
make: widely-used build automation tool
ncurses: library used to create text user interfaces (TUIs)
Octave: GNU numerical computation system (MATLAB-ish clone)
readline: library for command line input, editing, and history
sed: GNU stream editor
tar: GNU tape archive creation, extraction, editing command line utility
termcap / termutils: database and programs for working with terminals in a portable way
wget: file fetching utilities for the HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP protocols
There is also a ton of other applications: