It CAN get pretty wild sometimes, though. For example, Flameshot (screenshotting utility) is only ~560KB as a system package, while its flatpak version is ~1.4GB (almost 2.5k times as big)
For the past few years, I just install the latest stable version of anything I use and never bother touching or tweaking anything ... never had a problem since.
And that's exactly how I'm trying to approach everything after the reinstall. I like tinkering with my system, but after a couple months it really starts messing with everything.
It's funny seeing this like literally a couple days after I decided it would be easier to reinstall my Mint sysyem than to fix the audio issues Pipewire was causing. I'm back on PulseAudio and haven't had issues since.
It CAN get pretty wild sometimes, though. For example, Flameshot (screenshotting utility) is only ~560KB as a system package, while its flatpak version is ~1.4GB (almost 2.5k times as big)