The newer Android versions aren’t that much more bloated. Sure. If you compare Android KitKat with Android 14 it is gonna be a bit more demanding probably esoecially on graphics, but overall there were a lot of improvements to the battery usage and memory management. You can have a 6 years old phone that will run the newest Android version just fine because you flashed it with a custom ROM.

When we get to the manufacturer’s custom skins… Well that’s a different story. Most of them are gonna be more or less bloated than stock Android, but this is a problem of manufacturers and the fact that mobile OS market and ecosystem is so much locked down compared to desktop, which makes it harder to remove bloat from your OS, install different ROMs and tinker with it, rather than Android being bloated as an OS.