At first I didn't once allow the corruption reach 100% until a quest required me to do so. The description of the bakery being consumed sounded like an endgame event, so I thought of it more as a timer for how long you could do each run before being required to ascend.
Also, random events happened very rarely, like, I only encountered golden cupcakes like 2 times, riddles 4 times, merchant 3, and I'm still looking for the other 12 void echoes.