Seeing as how the internet, the world wide web, and the GNU software ecosystem had all existed prior to the development of the Linux kernel, I can easily imagin

Seeing as how the internet, the world wide web, and the GNU software ecosystem had all existed prior to the development of the Linux kernel, I can easily imagine the internet existing without the Linux kernel. As you point out, BSD had existed since 1978. Even so, you can't get the Linux kernel without a C compiler - which gets my vote! :)