The bloat is coming from inside the house!
Customization is and always will be a key selling point of Linux, that’s why I refuse to recommend any district with gnome as DE.
It’s all fun and games until you have to actually maintain everything as time goes on. At some point the tradeoff in personal time becomes too great.
My ricing days are long gone. Now I just roll with the defaults and adjust the key bindings since my muscle memory has already hardened into diamonds.