> ... dbus [is] pretty critical for anything linux regardless

Weird. If I weren't a sicko and had OBS Studio installed on my multipurpose box [0] I'd not have dbus installed on it.

dbus is generally optional; not that many packages require it. [1]

[0] Two of its several purposes are video transcoding and file serving.

[1] This is another area where Gentoo Linux is (sadly) one of the absolute best Linux distros out there.