"strip everything down" consists in removing packages, especially daemons, you don't need. You don't (want to) make huge changes to the kernel and libraries co

"strip everything down" consists in removing packages, especially daemons, you don't need. You don't (want to) make huge changes to the kernel and libraries codebase tho, even if the changes are meant to remove code you don't need, because testing a heavily modified OS gets prohibitively expensive. Especially on "modern" embedded from the last 10 years were RAM and storage are not that limited.