But for me that beats the purpose. You still end up with the complexity. Only now you have to add and manage it yourself in some other way, probably being worse off then when you would have started with all that complexity but integrated in one standardised package (distro).

Imho, the issue is not that the solutions are complex but the problems we (assume we) need to solve are. Just making simple solutions that ignore the bigger problems underneath do not really help in the end.

The purpose can be to make a simple system, not an easy to use one. A simple system can maintain its simplicity by avoiding tackling complex problems - however if you want to tackle those problems yourself then, sure, you'll also need to handle that inherent complexity that the original system decided to avoid. But that is complexity you invite in, not something that the original system had.

That doesn't make the original system any simpler or more complex.

The Philosophy is "it's easier to do things that were already done before".

So the project is an arbitrary reduction of scope and then writing the implementation just for that scope.