I ran some tests to determine the speed impact of removing unnecessary third-party extensions, per this article: https://www.integer-net.com/make-magento-2-small-again/ The TL;DR is that pages loaded about 10% faster (with full_page
and block_html
disabled) with the unnecessary extensions removed.
Extensions I removed:
"replace": {
"magento/module-dhl": "*",
"magento/module-fedex": "*",