I don't think there's even been a point in Rails history where you've been forced to install something. I think those are all ActionCable dependencies, which I'm pretty sure you can deactivate (not every app requires the capability it offers).
The only way to deactivate it is from your app's Gemfile (remove gem "rails" and add all the active/action gems individually). For new apps there's a flag "--skip-action-cable".
In the future probably the faye/redis will probably be made adapter based (similar to ActiveRecord and ActiveJob) and exctracted in a gem. So if you want actioncable you'll have to add a "actioncable-faye-adapter" gem to your Gemfile.
