There's a difference between bloated and batteries included. From a development point of view, macOS has native system libraries for things no other platform seems to include native system libraries for. And by "native system libraries" I do not mean downloadable content, dynamic support or anything similar, even if they're first-party. Though having unremovable system apps for every one of Apple's services MAY count as bloated if you don't use them.
From operating system I want a very bare bones experience. I definitely don't want operating system to ship with browser, file manager, terminal emulator, PDF viewer or rich text editor. And I absolutely don't want operating system to ship with chess engine, AI thing and some weird disk search utility which never works but always eats my CPU.
You might argue that some tools like terminal emulator or text editor might be necessary to solve some basic OS issues, but these tools should be extremely simple, like notepad.exe (old one!) or cmd.exe.
Anything other should be distributed in application store or any other way but not as a part of base operating system.
Nor Windows not macOS suits me for that definition, at least their default distributions (I'm pretty sure that it's possible for Apple or Microsoft to build bare bones operating system distribution, but so far they didn't bother and I won't accept some unsupported third party modifications). Linux somewhat suits me, as I can build something with little effort. It'll still contain lots of stuff I have no idea about, but these tend to not show up loudly.
There’s a big difference between unnecessary applications taking up space on your storage device, and unnecessary services running in the background competing for RAM and CPU with the applications you actually want to run.
You've defined every OS that doesn't let you customize what services run, which Windows certainly does. As you strip away certain services, functionality is going to be limited, but the capability is there and has been since NT was released - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VxIgY0tQqR4.
You have options on macOS via launchctl, but I'm not sure how low you can go.
Neither give you the same capability as Linux, of course.
As long as you ignore that whole part of the OS was still running 68K code on PPC Macs, it crashed like a drunk driving a semi truck without protected memory and the end user still had to fiddle with the amount of memory an app could use
I miss having snappy menubar lists, at the Apple Store yesterday I noticed on the Neo that the transparencies and iconified menu items with shortcut glyphs are still perceptibly less buttery smooth.
