Mint is actually really good about not having weird dependency chains, and even if it did uninstalling apps would warn you about it. That is a very strange thing for people to have said. It is perfectly normal and good to have some things you don't want or prefer an alternative to and uninstall them. Default Mint is a great sane starting point for a complete OS, and I think their updater is the best in the entire Linux world, but it's still Linux. You can still customize it to your heart's content. Anyone who says otherwise is just being a creep.
I mean, he can be the most important founding father of modern psychology and also have been wrong about everything he said. Let's be real. Modern psychology is still very, very wrong about a lot of things. It's a science in its infancy. Alchemists were wrong about everything, but their work made chemistry possible. Standing on the shoulders of giants doesn't always mean those giants were right.
This is fine, but why does everything need to be part of Systemd? Like, seriously, why can't this just be an independent project? Why must everything be tied into this one knot of interdependent programs, and what's going to happen to all of them when the people who are passionate about it and actually understand all the stupid ways they interrelate move on with their lives? Are we looking at the formation of the next Xorg? Will everybody being scrambling to undo all of this in another 20 years when we all realize it's become an unmaintainable mess?
Honestly, unless there's some specific thing you're looking for just use your distro's default. If your distro doesn't have a default I'd probably default to ext4. The way most people use their computers there's really no noticeable advantage to any of the others, so there's no reason not to stick with old reliable. If you like to fiddle with things just to see what they can do or have unusual requirements then btrfs or zfs could be worth looking into, but if you have to ask it probably doesn't matter.
Most people aren't going around checking the commit history on every piece of software they use. The git repository being archived made the Linux news rounds, so now a bunch of people are newly aware. It's not complicated.
And I'm hoping you grow up and learn how people organize themselves instead of wasting your life feeling morally superior for accomplishing nothing while isolating yourself from all the people you need on your side to change anything.
If you think the US government gives a shit about "millions in bribes" then you have no idea how numbers work.
I'm not delusional enough to think I'm voting for a leftist. That's never what Biden was. I'm voting to stop fascism. Socialism isn't going to win at the ballot box. Elections are how we stop things from getting worse while implementing real solutions. If all you're doing is whining about presidents then you are a bad leftist.
Not doing everything possible to prevent something is not the same as actively doing it. It's still bad, but if you seriously think it would be a good idea to let fascists take over America because Biden isn't marching troops into Gaza or whatever it is you want him to do, then hopefully there are enough sane people left to make you irrelevant.
Open source is not a very useful term. Grayjay isn't free and libre software because it restricts commercial use, and it is definitely source available software. Whether that makes it open source depends on who you ask, and no, OSI is not the undisputed arbiter of all things open source just because they say so.
Griping because someone is using a different definition of open source than you do when they are being very clear about what exactly their license allows is not productive.
These kinds of lists have to factor in popularity too though. Otherwise the top 1,000 would all be shovelware with 1 or 2 negative votes. It's not interesting or useful to point out that the games no one is going to play anyway are bad. A game that's popular enough to even make it onto the list obviously isn't going to actually literally be the worst game on Steam. That's just how it has to work.
Musk is actually kind of impressive at this point. It takes some real talent and determination to make Zuckerberg look like the good guy in comparison. There are not many people in the world who can even manage to pull that off once or twice, and Musk is doing it over and over again.
Hey, if you don't think distributions are doing anything, you can always use Linux From Scratch.
Seriously though, most of the work done by good distros is specifically so you don't notice things. They make a bajillion independent open source projects work together nicely. That's something I'm glad I don't have to do myself.