seriously.. went through bleak falls barrow for like the 20th time and there was more junk lying around than there were enemies O_o is this a bug? or is it like that for YOU aswell?

Take the items and go sell them?

I think that's a "feature" - so that you can drop stuff if you are encumbered, and come back and get it later. One thing you can do - bodies get cleaned up pretty quickly, so if you want to permanently "destroy" something, put it on a body. It should be gone next time the cell resets.

This is a game mechanic, it mimics real life in simulating your home becoming a junk yard if you don't tidy [censored] up.
I tend to shove anything I ditch on a corpse to prevent this, it can lead to massive save files and long loading times if you leave the place in a mess.
The up side is that people who spent eternties placing items in homes don't get their work deleted.

yep I always make sure after killing stuff in the open world to load the weapon back onto the body to make sure they "disappear with the body" less clutter in the world

Yup I recommend doing this too.

Still, I do have to admit that it might have been nice if junk gets cleaned up automatically after like 1 in-game month (to give you time to retrieve what you want). Some cells like homes could be flagged to never be cleaned up (the garbage collector would just skip them). Some items could have been marked to be skipped by the GC (quest items, rare items, daedric artifacts, and the like), even if they were in a regualr, garbage-collected cell. Oh well.

Didn't previous TES games do some sort of garbage collecting like that?

Good and bad, what's on the ground stays on the ground.

Good because it will be there when you get back

Bad because it increases the size of the save file.

The stuff that is there when you first show up is OK, it is the stuff the NPC drops that contributes to file size increase.

Now, just to note, while I have not been to more than one third of the dungeons, I never clean up after myself unless they drop a nice weapon and I have not had an issue yet. But, it would not hurt to clean up if you think about it, but don't worry that you have to clean up.

Multiple issues here, dungeons has an respawn rate of 30 days, returning before this might or might not reset the reset counter but anyway 30 days is minimum.

Second is that dungeon reset is simply that all object who belong to the dungeon is reset, monster bandits even the junk is removed and new is placed, random and level scaled things are recalculated.

However if you drop something, even pick up an axe and then drop it, it belong to you not the dungeon so it will not be affected by the reset. I you place anything in a body or an container it will disappear. This is done as it's simpler to just remove all objects related to the dungeon and replace it than rebuilding the scene.

Yes it causes save bloat but main reason is that ash piles are also not in this dungeon list, the same for some weapons enemies drop.

If their was Lava around, I would drop my items in it.

You might be thinking of the wrong game lol

Not played that game in a while lol

No friend, Mordor is to the southeast... Oh wait! That was Vvardenfel, sorry.

Lava is not an container, so it would not help with the save file issue.

But, it would be a nice mechanic.