Memory requirements does not mean that something is bloated.

Windows XP required 64 MB of RAM. Does it mean Debian is bloated then?

AFAIK perfomance and low resource usage has never been a main objective of this distro

Can someone explain? Isn’t removing bots actually a good thing?

Is there a reason why you gathered so many features in a single update? It seems to be challenging to test all these features at once, why not just publish them step by step in smaller updates? For instance, Mastodon have even split quote posts into two separate versions (first backend, then frontend) to make this process smoother.