> Been there done that. I have too many other things that need to get done to build up a distro.
Yes, but my comment wasn't made in isolation or directed at people with your objectives. The OP's article is about doing exactly this, but in the opposite direction (expending large amounts of effort to remove unneeded processes). See for example: "if we assume that we need to identify just 500 candidates, and each takes an average of one week to research, that would take over 10 person-years".
Starting with that as the baseline (as opposed to starting from your position which is that you're not interested in spending time on this issue), building up from zero is a lot more straightforward. And, if you use something like NixOS, you generally only have to do it once since the idea of "reinstalling" the OS (e.g. for new versions) largely goes away: subsequent effort is just about changing your mind about what software you want, or what version you want (as with any OS).