Dumitru Brinzan of ilovewp.com writes:

Currently WordPress powers over 60 million websites, that is an estimated ~33% of the Internet. Some of these websites are large websites with tens of thousands of content pages. But a vast majority of WordPress websites are run by regular people and small businesses, many of them with probably less than 20 pages of content.

Now imagine that these millions of WordPress websites rely on thousands upon thousands of files, hundreds of megabytes worth of scripts and libraries, just to output a few hundred of cached kilobytes of “Hello World” content.

This has been my predicament 10 years ago. If I thought WordPress was bloated back then, more so it is now! My suggestion: have a 1.) WordPress full install script and 2.) WordPress core (or call it WordPress Lite, if you will), taking away functionalities like Gutenberg, Custom Post Types and Formats, and Multi-Site support.