I mean, much of it meets all the criteria to be called malware, so it is "walking like a duck" and "quacking like a duck".

All that bloat is typically cross-marketing agreements made with the makers of those apps to subsidize the phone's cost without user consent. The part that I find weird is that there have been almost no marketing trials from major players testing the waters to see how much of a market there is for the same products that are not subsidized in this way, available at "full price". Maybe they're afraid that would draw too much attention to how atrocious the existing offerings are by comparison. It might put the privacy discussion more into the public discourse, which could be bad for their "business model".