If I only wanted to degoogle and disable other manufacturer’s bloatware from my Android device, is using adb to “uninstall” the system apps from user 0 pretty much as effective as rooting and using something like debloat terminal while rooted or are there bypasses that make rooting the better option? I’m not concerned about reclaiming the space used by these disabled system apps in this case.
Anything that modifies the system partition will impact SafetyNet so you probably don’t want to uninstall apps. You also can’t reclaim freed space and you risk removing something that’s actually useful, so there isn’t much benefit.
Disabling apps (or “freezing” as Titanium calls it) is just as effective and root is enough for that. Disabling is a userspace setting so it doesn’t count as modifying system, it’s basically a sort of preference.