I am willing to bet that over 75% of folks do little, if any, disk cleanup/maintenance. I actually am doing disk cleanup every day by permanently removing deleted EMails in Thunderbird. It's just second nature to me. And I have consistently seen folks have issues with Apple's Mail program. When I mention permanently removing deleted EMails, they don't have a clue what I am referring to.
I think you grossly overestimate the number of Mac users that do any, if any, disk maintenance. I used to have a regular daily, weekly, and monthly routines but with the evolution of MacOS, I have come to the conclusion they are no longer needed and are a waste of time. The advent of solid state drives means some of those routines no longer have any impact on performance. Taken together with APFS where the old file and drive optimizing routines I used to rely on can be counter-productive.
However, I manually perform semi-regular "house-cleaning" eliminating unused apps and utilities, and eliminating file duplication.
If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?
