So where to find it?
Where to find it is a moot point if you erase the Mac, which must be accomplished if you actually used "CleanMyMac" to do anything. It's what I recommend because it saves time (mine) and money (yours).
There are remedies short of erasing the Mac which I will address presently.
****, how come you all level 10 geniuses can't agree on the issue...🤦♀️😀 Some say get AppCleaner, some say don't...
Not everyone has the motivation to actually install use and observe various and sundry junk products to determine how they affect Macs. That is one of the tasks incumbent upon those volunteering to help others — "when possible" — according to this site's Terms of Use, and is the very reason I advise erasing the affected Mac, because I have actually installed and used "CleanMyMac" (as well many similarly categorized products).
What led to my recommendation was a user who presented a Mac that was not performing well. It was slower than it should have been with its exhaust fans were running unjustifiably loud. None of the usual fixes worked — rebooting, "safe mode", nothing helped. All hardware was in perfect working order. Reinstalling macOS did not help (it usually doesn't). Upon asking about its history she had used that product to "clean" the Mac. A long time later, after learning it was junk, the user completely and correctly uninstalled it. There were no remnants of it anywhere. An EtreCheck report revealed nothing of interest. Yet the problem continued.
Pause here to reflect: There were no remnants of it anywhere. None. Everything it installed was gone. No components remained. Nothing. So much for using "AppCleaner" or anything like it.
The question remained: why was the Mac performing so poorly? It was a few years old and the user was already thinking the Mac was just worn out and needed replacement. Justified or not I suspect Apple doesn't mind when people arrive at that conclusion.
After some investigating using the Console app (which I generally do not recommend, because it's full of arcane terminology that tends to cause concern) it turns out a normal macOS process was constantly attempting and failing to write to a file that no longer existed because aforementioned junk app "cleaned" it. The poor Mac was hammering itself to death.
Wait, what? I thought macOS itself is impervious to alteration and cannot be affected no matter how hard some junk apps might try. That's true. The file in question existed in the user space, where it was vulnerable to attack by the "cleaning" app. Reinstalling macOS failed to fix it because that action does not alter User files. It may arguably be considered an oversight on the part of macOS programmers to foresee the possibility a User file macOS depends upon might inexplicably vanish, but at some point it's unreasonable to code in anticipation of every possible contingency.
For someone with the time and motivation to investigate a problem in such depth it is possible to exhaustively determine which file(s) went missing, rebuild them in the proper locations and in the proper format with the proper permissions, and go about fixing the problem in that manner. In fact that is exactly what I did, and all turned out well without having to erase the Mac. Good as new.
For people who actually have a life beyond delving into the inner workings of a Mac, erasing it will be the most expedient solution.
Or, just buy a new Mac. Apple will be very happy.
