I did the same thing recently too and felt elated. I ran System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 9. The simple fact that a drive with System 7 installed is completely empty, sa

I did the same thing recently too and felt elated. I ran System 7.5.5 and Mac OS 9. The simple fact that a drive with System 7 installed is completely empty, save for the System folder, made me see my macOS drive structure in a whole new way. Mac OS 9 is clearly made by people who were also working on OS X at the time, and it includes a ton of little hints of it which kind of hide the simple zen of System 7. I hope you give 7.5.5 a try with Basilisk.