The "crap" is primarily from geoclue which supports numerous methods of getting your location. Some of them such as geoip require making network connections. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoClue

It would be absurd for Redshift to include its own networking (don't forget proxies and SSL), GPS, and other code. On Linux (Ubuntu especially), all those dependencies are installed by default and used by many other components. "crap" is the last thing to describe it.

OpenBSD doesn't have them by default which is why they show up. Redshift does support specifying your location on the command line or config file. gentoo has use flags where you can explicitly include (eg +geoclue) or exclude (eg -geoclue) components. I suspect OpenBSD doesn't, so it came down to whoever authored their port deciding to use geoclue by default.

It is an entirely reasonable decision. You use this software on personal machines (ie not servers), and people move around. Defaulting to something that usually works right is fine.

You are of course welcome to do a competitor, and show us all how much better it could be :-)

I don't really care either way about this, but to me, seems like a classic case of bloat, where the program is doing too many things at once.

It makes more sense to have a core app that does the basic functionality and can be run from CLI, and then separate out the the various components that perform different duties and require more dependencies etc, in a modular architecture. It's just better software design and you avoid a lot of pitfalls and hassle to end-users and integrators - just like the issue described by the OP.

That's exactly how it is. It does not want to figure out the location itself, so it consults other software, which is optional.