tl;dr Do what GNOME, KDE, SystemD, Linux, GNU is doing:
be the change you want to see.

For a workstation, private computer. I think the Linux userland with all its options, abandoned good ideas, maintained and financially supported stupid ideas, ancient three-letter magic commands /etc. Is a fun rabbit hole to be in. And just as wildefyr mentions there is always a more pure choice, but it comes with a price, just as the alternatives comes with a price (sometimes prefixed with $). It is totally feasible to make ones own userland (and off course ones own custom kernel build). But there is really no point in yelling in to the void and demanding that GNOME, KDE, Firefox, GNU or whatever should become more minimal and less dependent on "bad" applications or syndromeD. "they" don't strive to be "minimal" and they are not "linux" (except for linux) or "unix" and they are probably not (you).