I'd say that bloat is whatever you define it to be and can vary depending on the power of your system.
I care less about how much resources apps are taking up on my desktop (32GB RAM, Ryzen 7700X), but I do bring my concerns over to my laptop (8GB RAM, Ryzen 4500U).
the one thing I cannot stand are electron apps and anything similar. they are a whole browser bundled with an unoptimized interface, and will eat up what used to be a decent amount of RAM for a laptop back then, as well as my battery life. for this reason I always try to find native apps that use less power and less RAM, which in turn improve my battery life.
this is just one example of where you can draw the line for bloat, although you are completely correct in saying that it is subjective.
in my personal experience of using it, it doesn't feel very polished in most places + strange bugs like being unable to install certain packages. doesn't have the comforts of a distro like Pop OS or Mint (i.e. automatic timeshift setup on first time boot, checking for missing dependencies for other packages). that's just my personal opinion on it.
granted it's a slow process but it can pay off if done right. I contribute what little I can to the project, as my Typescript is not the best and Discord knowledge even less.
the most "drop-in" replacements I know of aimed towards users (not companies) are
Matrix+Element Client: Supports E2EE and voice + video chat, it works very well, but the onboarding experience of federated platforms is still confusing for some, and along with that they have to change knowledge of guild/channel type chats to space/room. I don't use this.
Tailchat: Very similar experience to Discord while not being it. It's functionality is extended through plugins. Integrating all the services I use into one app is not as bad of an idea as it sounds, and I like the implementation very much, as do my friends. That being said, it's, very bare-bones in it's current state, and not much you can add through said plugins besides voice + video chat and bots. This is what I use right now.
Spacebarchat: Very very alpha, but the end goal is very promising, that being complete backend compatibility with anything designed for Discord. The official client will not be finished anytime soon, so you have to bring your own Discord-compatible client and modify the endpoints to connect to and get any major use out of a Spacebar instance. Voice and Video chat still isn't there yet, but most all other things work as expected. I keep my eye on it, and will probably use it later on in it's more finished stages.
Nearly all of them. Nextcloud, Jellyfin, Vaultwarden, Spacebar, and 2fAuth, all set behind an NGINX Reverse Proxy, SWAG. SWAG made it very easy to set up https and now I can throw anything behind a subfolder or subdomain.
this. after i set different zsh themes on my servers + my main machine i now know exactly what machine i’m running commands to