Alas I don't know much more than that; I only remembered about the CLI bit in 1.x and went to check it was still there.

You may be able to build exactly what you want with the image generation tools, as it goes:

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-image-gen

https://github.com/RPi-Distro/pi-gen

Customising the OS with pi-gen is not that bad. It's an idiosyncratic tool but it works; I've not used the newer rpi-image-gen stuff.