I’m excited that Apple now has a reason to keep MacOS small. Their soon to be top-selling machine has 8GB and they won’t want to make all those millions of Neos unusable by shipping a bloated OS.
You have options on macOS via launchctl, but I'm not sure how low you can go.
Neither give you the same capability as Linux, of course.
You might argue that some tools like terminal emulator or text editor might be necessary to solve some basic OS issues, but these tools should be extremely simple, like notepad.exe (old one!) or cmd.exe.
Anything other should be distributed in application store or any other way but not as a part of base operating system.
Nor Windows not macOS suits me for that definition, at least their default distributions (I'm pretty sure that it's possible for Apple or Microsoft to build bare bones operating system distribution, but so far they didn't bother and I won't accept some unsupported third party modifications). Linux somewhat suits me, as I can build something with little effort. It'll still contain lots of stuff I have no idea about, but these tend to not show up loudly.