Yeah, that's just shit behavior. You often see this from sophomores - people who were themselves newbs a short while ago and now thing they're experts. It's just people, man.

I don't know why anyone couldn't remove whatever they wanted, as long as they looked carefully at the list of other things that are going to be removed and didn't notice anything they recognize and want to keep. There are no distributions I know of that will let you remove dependencies without telling you what they're needed for. There are several distributions where you tell the package manager to remove something, and everything that depends on it, and not ask you to confirm anything. But, then, all Linuxes will let you sudo rm -rf /, too.

Nobody should have to get any answer to this question other than: "remove whatever you want; just pay attention to what the package manager is telling you."

I haven't used Mint in ages so I can't really help with specifics, but generally if you know what it is and you don't use it, it's fine to remove. If you don't know what a specific package is, look it up before removal. Read the output closely before you actually remove anything.

Also, if you're using a VM you probably can take a snapshot of the state prior to making any changes. If things work well, no worries. If it didn't boot, just roll back.

People will suggest Arch (what I use FWIW), but I wouldn't recommend it unless you want to learn.

What I did when I first set up Mint is go through the applications in the main menu and uninstalled anything I didn’t want. Anything you can’t just right click and select uninstall you should be able to remove by opening up Synaptic.

I’m not sure how much space you’d really be able to reclaim since many of these packages are negligible in size, anyway. But you’re probably fine as long as you leave the system tools alone.

In theory, you should be able to remove any high-level applications you don't want, and you should be fine. In practice, it might not be so clean and easy.

The reason there are so many distros out there is because lots of people have different needs and wants. Mint is designed to be an easy-to-use OS out of the box, so it contains lots of default applications. The target audience of Mint are people who want this behavior.

If you want a more minimal or custom install, consider using a distro that is geared toward that (e.g., Arch, Alpine, Debian w/o desktop). If you need to run Mint specifically for testing, then it depends on what kind of testing you're doing--if it's for an end-user test case, you'll probably want to leave all the default stuff on there as that's a better representation of the target system. Otherwise you're fine to uninstall anything you don't want, but it's possible that the dependency tree isn't perfect and you might need to troubleshoot a little.

Mint is based on Ubuntu, so you could try Ubuntu itself without the Mint stuff bolted on.

Ubuntu asks you what you want pre-installed when you're setting it up.

And since Ubuntu has all the same flavours that mint does (and more), it'll look like what you expect it to. Modern Mint uses Cinnamon whereas old Mint uses Mate, so just choose the one you're already familiar with.

So how do you define “packages that can be removed without any problems”? How do you know for a fact that, in a week, you won’t need some piece of software that you removed? If you gave us more information about your intentions and use cases for a “minimal Mint” environment, that would be helpful.

EDIT: also, if you’re just running this in a VM for “testing”, why not just remove shit until you identify an issue? This type of problem is usually addressed in the opposite direction, by adding things until you get the desired result, not removing things until you break something.