I find myself inventing new curses for those who screwed things up with these overblown, over complex, minimally functional abominations
Gosh, tell me about it. I once tried writing a custom wifi signal strength indicator app that got its information from network-manager. Apparently the only way to programmatically communicate with network-manager is through dbus, which is just terrible. Scarce to no documentation, poor support for any language other than C/C++, and once you do get it working, it's the most disgusting and overly verbose code you've ever seen, just to query the status of the wifi card. Could've exposed the API through raw unix sockets or something, but nope, they had to reinvent the wheel on that one as well.
Just give me vi and the basic configuration files and let me get on with it!
I'll take this opportunity to shill for Void Linux, it sounds like exactly what you're describing. I've been a happy user for like 5 years now. I particularly like how nothing ever breaks, because there's not much to break on such a minimal system.
...well, actually, a few things did break over the years, but most of those were due to user error haha.