I did! Zorin-os-desktop... not so mandatory?
It took me a whole week to find the only actual difference: I had lost access to the settings menus. All of them. Otherwise, everything worked despite zorin-os-desktop being gone. Unfortunately, Zorin put PulseAudio back during the next update, while my settings remained broken. Disappointment.
The freedom of choice is much touted in Linux, but in my limited experience, everything I'd want to change has been blocked or impaired by dependency. There's a lot I like about Linux, but for reasons both absolutely legitimate and probably others much less so, the modularity has only been of use to me in removing snapd.