You seem to lack an understanding of operating system architecture. Linux is indeed only the kernel and not an operating system by itself. There is endless amounts of primary and secondary literature on that. And from its earliest conception onward, when Linus Torvalds was still at the University of Helsinki and struggled with finding POSIX documentation, Linux (the kernel) never worked as a complete general-purpose operating system without external utilities. In the beginning, those were MINIX based, but Linus then adopted the freely available GNU utilities. So no, Linux is not an operating system and you cannot run it as such without utilities. Now, those must not necessarily be GNU, but I think that the term GNU/Linux is still justified because GNU and Linux are strongly intertwined with each other from the point of the latter’s birth until today and into the future.
You seem to lack an understanding of operating system architecture. Linux is indeed only the kernel and not an operating system by itself. There is endless amounts of primary and secondary literature on that. And from its earliest conception onward, when Linus Torvalds was still at the University of Helsinki and struggled with finding POSIX documentation, Linux (the kernel) never worked as a complete general-purpose operating system without external utilities. In the beginning, those were MINIX based, but Linus then adopted the freely available GNU utilities. So no, Linux is not an operating system and you cannot run it as such without utilities. Now, those must not necessarily be GNU, but I think that the term GNU/Linux is still justified because GNU and Linux are strongly intertwined with each other from the point of the latter’s birth until today and into the future.