Projectivy has turned out to be my favourite launcher for the Shield TV after trying a bunch. It displays only the things I want to see, and has a great deal of options.

Throwing in my recommendation for the ultra minimalist Flauncher.

Oh, I've seen instructions, most of them start with "enable dev mode, then use adb to run ton of inscrutable commands that may or may not break the system over time".

Overall, it seems like a recipe to end up in an unknown state where you can no longer easily get updates and the only recovery is to wipe the system.

I've seen similar methods to "Clean up Windows 11", and it always seems like you're just putting the device into an unknown state. A few ads you can become blind to is not as bad as a totally broken system.