Written Scenes Too Much Too Little?

Hello! Hope you all are having an excellent start to the week. Going through Klytië’s manuscript, I realized in all the rewrites, I added and removed details for various plot points that don’t actually mean anything. I have little scenes within larger scenes and go from extensive descriptions to barely any. There are some sections with so many ideas and plot points or writing devices that it comes off oddly unbalanced between action and exposition.

In the book I’m reading, Self-Editing for Fiction Writers: How to edit yourself into print, chapter four provided some clear guidance on the issue and how to fix it.
In Chapter 4, the book talks about proportions in your book. This is different than the show don’t tell; it’s about how long it takes to get through a scene and how much time is spent on details that may or may not be irrelevant to the storyline. Although showing and telling likely help remove some issues with proportioning ideas in one’s writing.

For example, when talking about a large group traveling together, I focused on the little details of each individual traveling as part of a group for several paragraphs. No one really cares that much about what each individual is doing, and it’s a long way of describing how on edge all the characters are in the scene. Whereas the interaction after indicating that the danger passed not quite as long but better shows the tension and group dynamics than the several paragraphs going into detail about the little details about flexing muscles and fiddling with hair, clothes, etc., each group member does during the waiting period.

So now I’m asking myself, what is the purpose of this paragraph? Are there any parts that detract from the story? Is this a plot piece that I will resolve later? If so, where? Does the description I provide in this paragraph balance out the action scenes, or is there too little or too much information?

How do you balance all the moving pieces when writing?