IMHO, linux distributions are an odd thing in the software world. It's basically people taking it upon themselves to take other software and repackage it for their distribution. That made some sense 30 years ago when you had to install linux from a CD (or floppies) and people necessarily had to package things up to fit on those CDs. But these days, that's much less of a thing.
The recent trends of distributions supporting things like docker, flatpak, snap, etc. enables software producers to package things up once and have them work on many distributions. So, there's less need to rely on package managers and their maintainers to figure out how to package up other people's software. Of course some of these things aren't perfect. But there's a large ecosystem of software that you can get this way that no longer requires packaging up. And even things like docker you can actually get via snap.
So, the fewer packages in a linux distribution, the better. Less that can go wrong, less space used on disk, less work to build and package things up, less hassle to update things, etc. All good things. Add the rest yourself as needed.