I came to gardening late and to editing early, and it took a few seasons to see that I was doing the same job in two places.
Cut for light
The first rule of pruning is to remove whatever is stopping light reaching the rest. Most of it is not dead and not wrong; it is merely in the way. A paragraph that is clever but crowds the one beside it is a branch that needs to go.
Thin before you tidy
New gardeners tidy; experienced ones thin. Tidying makes a plant look neat for a week. Thinning changes what it can become. In prose, tidying is fixing commas. Thinning is deciding which of your three examples is the real one.
Leave some wildness
A garden with every edge clipped feels anxious, and so does a piece of writing with every sentence polished to the same shine. Leave a corner where something odd can grow.
The work is done when you can no longer find the place where the gardener was standing.
That is as good a standard for a paragraph as I know.