My OG moto droid was pretty clean back in ~2009 or so, but even then there was plenty of sketchy carrier installed bloatware. Even my blackberry before that, feature phones even before that, had the carrier crap on it.

Part of why iPhone was such a breath of fresh air at the time it released. There was no carrier bloatware. Apple didn't allow it. Verizon turned down the iPhone because they would not agree to the no carrier branding and did not want to give Apple control over updates.

It's only gotten worse since then, but yeah its always been a thing.

At least with iPhone, there's still no carrier bloat, no facebook/meta, no linkedin, etc.

I'm not sure why Samsung continues to allow it either, they are also big enough to bully the carriers they could just as easily pull an Apple and kick all the spam off their phones, at least for the flagship models.