I agree... so if you use the GUI, the window manager has a lot to do with it (hence the other posters comment about wayland). The author also notes the size of the download/distro, which is not equal to install size. If you wanted to go really crazy, perhaps install gentoo and only put in the packages you absolutely need?

I still find this site terribly useful, and parse through distros probably once a month. https://distrowatch.com/