I don’t think the finger is being pointed at Arch though

You also control what’s being installed on other distros. In fact, other distros split their packages in a way more modular way which allows one to pick and choose what one needs granularly. In Arch, the package count is lower because the maintainers don’t split stuff up. But you get all the so called bloat when you installna regular package

And you’d have to try pretty hard to make it as infested with snaps.