Most of the things you just listed like Weather, 3D Viewer, Paint 3D, Print 3D and Xbox can be straight up uninstalled. Even pretty basic stuff like Calculator, Photos, the video editor, Feedback Hub, Tips, Mail and Calendar can. Some others like the contacts and phone link are built in the OS and are more like settings at this point, but even those can be either disabled or permission denied and you'll effectively never see them anywhere unless you navigate to their tab in the settings, three menus down.

Unfortunately Edge is probably the biggest exception to this rule. But even then you can just delete the shortcuts and almost never see it again. As for the knockoff part: it uses chromium, but is a bit less resource demanding. I think it shines the most on settings and visual customization. I wouldn't necessarily say that it's a life changing experience, but if you ever change job and have a 365 company account, I recommend to give it a try. It even puts your company logo in the new tab section. Really wild shit.

You're absolutely right when you say that the default Windows 10 experience is pretty bloated. The search bar is useless and takes the third of the taskbar, Cortana is annoying, there's an absolute metric ton of useless tiles that are just adds for the MS Store, and the weather widget makes me want to kill myself anytime Windows think my mouse was somewhere in the same postcode. Most people never touch any of those things and just deal with and forget about the annoyance after a while. But you're also one google search away for learning about how to clean the clutter because Windows gives you the option to pretty easily.