I know there is lots of guides and things because for clicks people like to write guides. However all the defaults on mint are sensible. You can pretty much install is stock and be done. You can use these guides if you want but they are optional. You can use flatpak, .deb, snap or whatever else you want to install things. I tend to use .debs when available and flatpaks as my backup. As a Linux user I haven’t had to do all that much tweaking in years to be honest.

How do you avoid it?.. You are right there.

Lazy and cheap.

The worst part to me is that so many companies use third parties to process parts of things that it’s like you give data to one company and they give your data to like 10 other companies and before you know it your information has been breached multiple times over from the same starting point.