You're seeing phones from vendors that have tacked their own stuff on top of the Android platform. Buy a Google phone and you'll find no cruft. There are still things you can't uninstall, but they're mostly essential to the functioning of the phone.
Google play movies and tv - likewise, essential?
Google play music
Google Hangouts
The list goes on...
And you're telling me the manufacturer decided I can't rid myself of these and google are as suprised as I am about that? Really? I mean you can make the same argument with Apple. They're happy for you to install/uninstall whatever but the manufacturer did it their way.
The answer (as with most Mac-related things) is to disable System Integrity Protection. For some strange reason, most of the people who complain about the loss of their freedoms on macOS leave SIP enabled and I wonder why.
(The difference is that APK is part of the RO partition which cannot be modified so that's the part that can't be cleaned up.)