Basically the view I had twenty years ago vs the view I have now. After being a UI-extender explorer for some years, I became a system-as-delivered person. I'm now at a healthy (for me) mix. I have a bunch of icons in my menu bar and an app to keep that tidy.

I agree. My menu widgets aren't the primary cause if my computer feels slow. It's almost always a ton of browser tabs because I collect stuff to investigate later and I procrastinate removing them.

However, I also see the point of the commenter that a lot of people who have a bunch of shit in the menu bar might not be computer people who understand what they are or how they got there. In those cases, people exploring things they don't know how to remove might accumulate a lot of other crap that causes a slow system.