Uninstalled junk apps keep coming back

I just upgraded this computer a few days ago from Windows 10 to Windows 11 and immediately went to work cleaning it up and streamlining it to make it work faster and to not have it take up too much room on my SSD drive, which is 238GB. One of the first things I did was begin deleting a bunch of apps that are in the start menu. I noticed that it freed up about 6 gigabytes of space. Today, I was looking at my apps list again to see if there were any others I could get rid of, and I noticed that all of the apps I got rid of before are reinstalled again. What is going on here, and how can I prevent it from happening again? I hate to think that Microsoft is telling me that I have to put up with whatever they put on my computer and that I have no say in the matter. That's what it feels like right now.