It’s a good question and years ago I might have asked the same thing. I’m a minimalist and I really dislike all the extra crap that comes with all-in-one distros these days. Not just installed programs, but also daemons and services that start by default. I hate the idea that I have to go in and manually turn them all off on new installs. I used Ubuntu for a long time but slowly got more and more annoyed at the bloat. The snap situation was the final straw that pushed me to explore other distros. I landed on Arch and really liked it. A new Arch install can be incredibly clean, basically providing nothing more than a command prompt from which you can install what you need. The only stuff running on your machine is what you explicitly put on it. There are a couple things I get annoyed with in Arch, like some baked-in drivers for hardware I don’t have, however it’s minor enough that I can let it go. I also played with Gentoo but couldn’t get comfortable enough to make it my daily driver. Arch is my personal best-balance between cleanliness and effort.