After three days of exploring this. I'm giving up. I can remove the tiles faster by hand.
I chose to forego all the existing scripts because they either don't work, or they uninstall items. There are too many hooks between too many apps to be confident in uninstalling apps without potential consequences.
With all the failures in modifying Start Menu items coming from Microsoft changes, I just can't take the chance that a production machine won't have an issue later (mostly with updates) because an app was removed.
I have also found that there is either no way (or the process is broke) to use XML to control the Start Menu for an existing user (without GPO).
And to top it all off, it appears the ability to modify the Taskbar is broke in 1803 or only works intermittently. Further, in all of the 100's of posts I've read, no one can actually provide a working example. It seems as though every time someone says "I got it working", some else says "post your XML", and they can't because it suddenly isn't working again.
I had narrowed the choices down to one:
Website: TimothyGruber.com
GitLab: https://gitlab.com/tjgruber/win10crappremover
but I was unable to make it work 100% of the time. I did not check to see if the unreliability was caused by varying levels of updates; I need it to work across all updates, because I need the start menu modification to work after the upgrade to 10 and before all the updates have taken place. I need to be able to go from 7 to 10 with a custom start menu in under an hour. If I have to wait for certain updates to apply, it could take two full days.
I'll keep searching for a solution, but for now, the Windows 10 upgrades are on hold.