From what I can see, gpsbabel is an optional plugin for qgis and isn't strictly necessary. If so, it should likely be an optfeature. (Particularly interested in this given gpsbabel depends on qtwebengine.) See e.g. https://docs.qgis.org/3.34/en/docs/user_manual/working_with_gps/plugins_gps.html#loading-to-or-from-a-device. Am I missing something?
Seems like it had that dependency since before git migration, and I don't look further than that.
At least Arch Linux are listing it as optional.
... although greping for gpsbabel in sources has many hits.