You're probably right many apps are not worth the risk, but I use quite of few single-purposes apps, my phone would be semi-useless brick without them and I can buy old school Nokia for just calls and SMS.

Heart rate (from optical sensor), free topo maps for outdoor, various transport apps (checking when buses/trams will go realistically based on their GPS), car navigation, watching BBC news, translate, use a freakin' calculator, browse phone file system, control my A/V receiver over wifi. And so on and on.

For every app removed I would lose an useful functionality that helps me quite often, for some there ain't any good replacement.

I think smarter is to not any sensitive data in the phone, consider it hacked out of factory and act accordingly.