implying all (or most) distros are the same
No, they aren't. Some distros fill a niche (for example, Gentoo, Guix, Alpine, Source Mage Gnu/Linux) and others offer stability and/or a lot of well-maintained packages (Arch/Artix, Debian, Kubuntu). There is also the matter of trust and security; Not all distros have a good track record. Also, maintaining a large catalog of packages takes a lot of effort. That being said, there are a lot of distros that don't offer any meaningful advantages over other distros (which means they are likely worse than others since as I said, it takes a lot of effort to maintain a distro).
>>43
I thought similarly when I was in middle-school, the niche is just lipstick. If you don't want to take my advice it's your loss; I don't care either way.
I am not disagreeing, there is a bit of a problem though: Often times you simply don't know the exact scope of problems to be solved. You rather have a range trying to cover the needs of your userbase as good as possible but hardly any of them will require the whole set of solutions. The ideal case where you can say with certainty that X is in/out of scope doesn't exist. Even thinking of what such a project would look like is bizarre. A static blob with hardcoded everything (any kind of configuration is obviously bloat when can be absolutely sure that every target environment looks the same).