I have very little experience with HAL and LL, and what I do have is quite old at this point. But ...
.. yes. HAL depends on its own runtime environment, which includes an IRQ for the SysTick timer (and possibly others). Also malloc() which of course also doesn't play well with hard realtime. It's also my experience that many of the higher-level software components don't have LL versions and thus require HAL.
I once removed the timer and malloc() components from a HAL implementation (USBD-CDC) but it wasn't easy and the result was messy even though it worked. Others here will may have better advise but I would suggest thinking about a non-HAL, non-LL, low level, "bare metal" register-based approach. That's what I do. YMMV.
