Being that I was new to both, I didn't have any ingrained best practices, and it was hard to find any best practices around when to use redux.

Every example seemed to use it for everything, which seemed insane to me in a real web app. I could see that the size and clutter would grow terribly, and for no obvious benefit.

Your example above is similar to how many component libraries work (where you need to give the user flexibility).

In a dashboard app, I'll make good use of Redux because there are often sets of data you revisit in different ways.

In a more directory-like site I've recently built I use it to keep track of the logged in user information and high level information that dictates your experience (like user location), but nothing else.