Hello, it's not really a bug in kali-tweaks. All that kali-tweaks does is install the metapackage that you asked to install. This being said...

Out of the box, the file /etc/apt/sources.list points to kali-rolling. When 2022.3 was released, kali-rolling was just a little bit ahead. But the more time goes, and the more kali-rolling moves ahead.

And so, when you start Kali 2022.3, say 3 months after it was released, ideally you should first upgrade your system (apt update && apt full-upgrade), and only after you should run kali-tweaks and install metapackages. Otherwise, well, it should work, but maybe the result is a bit more unpredictable, because you find yourself upgrading parts of the system, not the whole system.

And this is not really documented, and kali-tweaks doesn't really help (it doesn't warn, or doesn't propose to upgrade the system beforehand). Maybe kali-tweaks should do better than that.

Aside from that: I just booted an up-to-date Kali system, installed kali-linux-default from kali-tweaks, and no package was removed (except for systemd-timesyncd, but that's not relevant here). So I believe that your problem will go away if you start from a 2022.4 Kali image, instead of a 2022.3 image.

Thanks for the detailed explanation! IN this instance I couldn't start from 2022.4, I had an odd issue where my laptop would not boot after installing. I didn't make a bug for it, because I have no logs to give at this point, but it seemed like an EFI entry wasn't being added. Installing 2022.3 was my work-around. I upgraded to 2022.4 after install, but it was after using kali-tweaks to install the metapackage.

Latest version of kali-tweaks (2023.1.1, soon in Kali rolling) behaves better, it will propose to upgrade the system before installing the metapackages (which is recommended but not mandatory), and it also asks for confirmation before installing the packages. This gives you a change to review the list of changes before accepting.

In theory, if the system is upgraded before installing the metapackages, there should be no problem. I tested it with your setup (Kali 2022.3, KDE desktop environment), I could reproduce the issue that you reported, and I could also validate that, by upgrading the system first, and installing the metapackage after that, there was no problem.

So I'm closing the issue. Thanks for reporting it, it's actually very helpful, and kali-tweaks was at fault here. I'm glad I could improve it.