It is both simultaneously, intertwined and inseparable. Well, I suppose it *could* be separated but then it wouldn't stand for the same issues anymore. The GNU Project is a technical effort based on the social, ethical, political, and moral issues that RMS has raised and been discussing for the last 36 years. RMS himself summarized his reasons for this pretty well end the end of one of his talks in 2010 when he said "I didn't say 'I want to replace UNIX 'cause I could do it so much better'" and what follows after: https://jxself.org/better.ogg. The GNU Project is the only project I know of that was founded *because* of these issues and has them listed in the founding documents. Even Debian, which people seem to like, was founded by Ian Murdock because of technical problems with SLS, not because of the issues that RMS has been talking about. Thus, the technical decisions in working on the GNU Project need to be considered in light of those issues and not purely on their own technical merits that "we're just making an operating system." I can think of some technical decisions in GCC that were driven by these issues.
This has been one benefit to the GNU Project having the BDFL model, as some other projects also have. There's been one person to keep the GNU Project on point with regard to these social, ethical, political, and moral issues rather than having them get stuck in committee to eventually settle on the lowest common denominator. There are a very small number of people in the world that I would consider to have an RMS-level of dedication to the social, ethical, political, and moral issues that he's been talking about all for all of these decades. Change the underlying foundation by changing out the leadership with other people with anything less than the very same level of dedication to those self-same issues and you change everything the GNU Project is based on. Different leadership with different people with lesser values (such as not seeing proprietary software as a social injustice and that both can co-exist, copyleft is a restriction, just for some examples but there are many others) would send the GNU Project in a different direction philosophically, technically and legally as it veers off at an angle to something else.
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