Sorry for the later reply, was working (oops, not really). From what I read, Stoat is just a rename of Revolt and the platform should really remain the same (when I had this up, some of the UI still read Revolt).

For the bloat, as a self-hoster (speaking for myself and not on the behalf of anyone else), you should try to be provided with the most direct solution to a specific issue. When looking at Stoat, and the output of the generate_config.sh, they basically shove down a whole lot of solution at one time. There's from what I can tell, 15 different configurations for containers, over half of them are static versions and who knows how they all intermingle between the configs (Jesus, that's a lot of config files). This produces a monstrous web of configuration that I really have no time to digest and get working for something I'm just 'playing around with'. All this and I didn't even attempt to integrate voice and video. Also (as a nitpick) requires you to spin up caddy but has a config to point to that to a different reverse-proxy if needed (I already had nginx proxy manager and got this working but the whole thing fails if you don't spin up caddy. insert sad horse noises).

This is where Continuwuity comes in, I have 4 containers that I have bespoke configured myself by reading the configs and 2 config files that I hand made based off the docs. I feel WAYYYY better at hosting this than Stoat. Even got the wife to help test the video and voice and it works great with Element. From start to end, took me 4-ish hours to be done.

I have hosted Synapse before and got it up and running but not with voice and video. IMO, it's a little bloaty as well (not nearly as bad as Stoat) but it's doable. Never attempted voice and video for this but again, Continuwuity is just much more straightforward and less overhead.