The bloat of the neovim distributions are real and what I would suggest for anyone who is a long time vim user is to check out kickstart. https://github.com/nvim-lua/kickstart.nvim , specifically the modular fork https://github.com/dam9000/kickstart-modular.nvim which will give you a great (minimal) starting point
Heh the thing I like about kickstart is everything is in one file, though it is a bit unwieldy, so I surrounded most bits around fold markers to make it a bit more manageable.
interesting! yeah I think the one file concept is really neat. Here are some more details about my config with the modular fork if you are curious https://jarv.org/posts/neovim-config/