I never used bloated themes and plugins anyway. As for bloatware outranking optimized websites I can only say one thing: google has lost its shit completely.
I searched yesterday for an affiliate program in a "self help" sub-niche (I won't say which one, but you can trust me) and, with the exception of 4-5 websites ranking on 1st page, all other 8 pages of results have been clogged with websites that look like parasites, or forums, russian and polish websites, and so on. There's been 8 pages of those and many of them (I clicked on them out of curiosity) have returned "this site can't be reached" type of errors.
I just re-checked the same keyword a moment ago, and apparently google has fixed a part of it (the spammy pages are gone, but the russian and polish websites, and forums, and less authority websites) are still there.
Anyway, with the dumb changes google has made lately I see them gone by 2030, but to be honest, I liked seeing those less popular websites on pages 2+ of google. It's so refreshing to see new faces. That's the only good thing that's come out of google this year in my opinion
