For the past few years, I just install the latest stable version of anything I use and never bother touching or tweaking anything ... never had a problem since.
And that's exactly how I'm trying to approach everything after the reinstall. I like tinkering with my system, but after a couple months it really starts messing with everything.
It CAN get pretty wild sometimes, though. For example, Flameshot (screenshotting utility) is only ~560KB as a system package, while its flatpak version is ~1.4GB (almost 2.5k times as big)