Windows 98 too with IE remover where you could decouple it from the shell andd use Win95's shell on top. Yeah, libre software solved it with ease today with Classic Shell and back in the day under any Unix/GNU/BSD with FVWM+RXvt against boated DE's or environments (maybe people won't know, but FVWM despite its features and look it was actually lighter than TWM) did the same surprise to me. Cycles mattered even under an Athlon, and as I loved emulation every non related cycle for MAME, PCSX and some new emulators was a waste on resources. Ditto for multimedia and games.

Oh, and sometimes MPlayer can still be faster than MPV with legacy machines. And the same happens with some Mplayer ports (or MPCHC which should borrow lots of code) against WMP or VLC itself.

I mean, yes, true, but there wasn't much to strip out of Win95!

I know. I did it. PC Pro magazine paid me to fit it into a very early SSD, which only held 16MB.

There was only 24MB of installation files!

https://winworldpc.com/product/windows-95/rtm

It took more installed, obviously. 16MB was hard but I did it. No help, no fonts, not even Notepad, but it ran.

Nlite came into its own with Win98 and especially Win98SE. You could cut that down by half easily. No IE, for instance. I used Opera.

It is still around!

https://www.nliteos.com/