unwanted additions? you mean like systemd, those timers that connect to the internet to download your firmware periodically, the snooping dump uploader for the kernel, the NTP time polling to canonical servers every 32 seconds. ok then (and I am not joking, Mint actually is pretty chatty on the network with unwanted additions), and not a pip of disclosure out of the box on that.
check /etc/systemd/timesyncd.conf (might want to relax the polling intervals and also use the public pools), this pretty much lights you up like a beacon to Canonical (also potentially possible to skew your clock so we control your time)
check systemctrl list-timers (look for fwupd, you can run this manually if you wish using fwupdmgr, a machine doing firmware updates on it’s own is not to my liking, imagine getting it to push out bad firmware?)
check for kerneloops daemon (I love reading unscrubbed logs and dumps for info, good way to get juicy internal info, not every app sanitises their logging, amazing what info one can find in there from a bad app)
do you even know what your machine is doing under the hood? Don’t worry Mint isn’t maintained by a “stranger”, neither is Ubuntu, nor Debian… nor systemd, nor the servers they connect to, don’t worry you’ve read all their code (and built it locally) and know them well along with whatever they do with the info collected
