Bloatware is still there, iMovie, Garageband, iWork is IMO bloat. Slightly more quality bloat maybe but I don't need 20GB taken up by stuff I'll literally never use.
Recent Mac OS updates are monolithic signed binaries that load into the protected disk partitions reserved for the OS. This is security feature to limit which processes can modify the OS. The downside is that it can’t do differential updates. I hope that, at some point, Apple will work out how to securely do differential updates and speed this up, but I’m satisfied with slower updates if it maintains security.
Pages, Numbers, Keynote, Garage Band, and iMovie are pre-installed. I don't use these apps and they are easy to uninstall, but they definitely came pre-loaded.