How I do it is I manually go through Windows' settings app and change the settings that are scattered throughout. You can also use an app to do this, O&O's ShutUp10 app is probably the best (and most importantly, safest) tool out there for this, as it'll properly disable things and it tells the user if it's safe or not to disable something. I don't directly use the ShutUp10 app for the majority of my tweaking, but once I go through Windows' settings app and disable certain things, once running ShutUp10 it picks up on the features I disabled in Windows' settings.
The only tweaks I use ShutUp10 for (for time saving reasons, I could do it manually through the registry/group policy too) is the settings to disable Windows Update from automatically downloading and updating drivers and the setting to disable the Microsoft Store from automatically installing "recommended" apps like Candy Crush.
In my experience doing mild tweaking and fixing others' PCs who ran apps and tweaked the heck out the OS, it's best to avoid things like running PowerShell scripts to mass remove all modern apps from Windows 10 or 11 as it actually semi-breaks the OS doing this. If you go too far it's so easy to break Windows and cause it to act weirdly.