I was going to uninstall the Pidgin messenger client as it is pretty useless these days but stopped when I discovered it would also completely uninstall the Cinnamon Desktop. Why this oddball dependency? Pretty sure Cinnamon works just fine without Pidgin!
It looks like the cinnamon-desktop-environment package depends on Pidgin (or Empathy). But the description of the package is “Cinnamon desktop environment - full desktop with extra components”. The cinnamon-core package (“Cinnamon desktop environment - essential components”) is what you need for Cinnamon the DE itself.
These packages are imported from Debian, so the Debian Cinnamon team (listed on those package pages) would be the people to talk to if you think they should change this.
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Ubuntu was doing that long time ago. Certain programs were marked as depended, so if you tried to uninstalled Empathy it would remove ubuntu-desktop. I learned things a the hard way. Then those packed were marked as optional so you can remove if needed.
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