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.
Those are part of the Bitcoin Core's code, your node doesn't need to have any of that if you don't want to and it's still Bitcoin. I don't need anything that isn't moving money from A to B in a legacy address, any other "features" added after that just add complexity and potential exploits, as well as nonsense usages of block space like ordinals and co. Anything that isn't for moving money from A to B is just cluttering both code and block space but "Bitcoin developers" like to "develop" this thing as if it was a Google app apparently. Let's just hope no fatal bug is added along the way as such experimental features are added on the most used node software.