This is something i have a strange sort of OCD about or obsession about. When I look on desktop threads or unixporn, and people post their fetches, I always look at how many packages they have installed. I find myself judging people who have more than 1000 packages on their system, or really thinking highly of people on really minimal systems with 200 or fewer packages. But when I think about it, I'm not sure this really makes any sense as something to care about. I currently have just over 600 packages on my system, and I feel for some reason constantly aware of this and almost guilty about it, like I know for sure some of those are libraries I needed to compile something once but I could remove if I needed to, but also I'm scare of breaking my system by uninstalling the wrong thing and so on. I'm constantly obsessing over getting that number lower but also I know it's kind of stupid thing to obsess about. Anyone else have this?

I used to be like that but at some point I just stopped caring, I'll run autoremove every now and then but that's about it. A different way to view it is less packages = less functionality

the closest thing I've ever come up with when it comes to there being an issue with having more packages is that it is theoretically a larger surface area to attack
in practice, you're more likely to get screwed to a bug in like Bash or Firefox than anything else by a lot

or maybe even you used some curl site.whatever/install.sh | sudo sh thing and every 1 of 100000 hits to that link just slips in a trojan lol

it's not entirely unreasonable to be concerned about it. A system with lots of packages installed:
1. presents a larger surface area for bugs and security issues
2. takes longer to upgrade
3. is difficult for a single user to understand
I think that last one might be the most important. It's simply not possible to have a good understanding of how your system works under the hood if it's composed of 1000 packages. Whereas one person could easily have a decent grasp on the functions of 100 or 200 packages. That being said package count is not a precise measure of system complexity. The unix philosophy favors lots of small simple programs other fewer large complex programs, so a system which follows the unix philosophy (which linux was built with in mind) would expect to have more but simpler programs installed. Also obviously package count only counts packages, not total programs, which might not be the same thing.

on my dev server i only have 202 packages installed (via pacman) I generally just install whatever I need and then forget about it

number of packages on it's own is a terrible thing to care about. not all distos package things in the same way so one system might say 600 packages but the same utilities installed on a different distro might need 900 packages for the same exact feature set.
i just checked my package count and it's 1650 ish. a fuck ton of those come from just installing steam and lutris on my nvidia hardware. i only deliberately installed like 30 packages, but they were all meta packages that each installed a fuck ton of other packages (each .so file is basically a separate package on void)
any time i remove a package i have to trim orphaned packages and there are always orphans to purge.
probably a better metric would be root du but even that can be biased a lot, and would only make sense in setups where the install root and /home/ are on separate partitions. maybe idle ram usage?