Considering how Taproot and other things are part of the Bitcoin protocol, any fork that doesn't have it is not exactly Bitcoin anymore. As for security, there is no trade off whatsoever and security of Bitcoin has not changed nor did the implementation of called Bitcoin Core. If it had, the entire Bitcoin as a network and system would be insecure not just your client alone.

As for the "code clutter", the code has actually gotten cleaner and more categorized and also a lot more improved and optimized over the years.