> Which is more bloated?

Microsoft Word

> Which is more light weight?

Notepad

> Which has more powerful features, some that you don't even notice right away, like spellcheck, grammar check, etc?

Microsoft Word

> Which has fewer features?

Notepad

Users who are complaining about bloat are usually complaining about either application performance, ease of use and basic task completion complexity and/or general cluttering of the UI. Longer than expected load times can lead users to believe an application is bloated as well. It's true that all these things might be caused by something other than bloat, but these are typical repercussions of adding general cruft and also these tend to be design decisions and implementation details separate from the feature that the bloat was added for.

Developers complaining about bloat (not the ones on HN giving a critique of a github repo after browsing it for a couple minutes, but the ones who are actually knee deep in source code trying to meet a deadline for a specific feature or bug fix and to whom the bloat is literally a gravity well affecting their development pace and agility) are usually referring to previous development cycles that they believe unnecessarily introduced complex libraries for simple tasks or outsourced application logic to dependencies that are not under control of the in-house development that have unnecessarily made the code base unwieldy and created more rotten code overall from a maintainability/extensibility vantage.

In both these cases, a good early signal of detrimental bloat would be someone taking out a PR that introduces 500MB to the application. Justifying it as I'm maximizing for DOLLARS makes me think of someone who just won the lottery deciding that as a result of their net worth increasing a thousand fold, they're going to start willingly paying 1000x the price for things and also buy 1000x the amount of things. Should anyone try to convince them of how this logic is going to work out (perhaps someone stuck behind them in line at the store as they ring out the tens of thousands of grocery items, each of which provides a special value most people don't use, understand, or even realize is edible), the lottery winner calmly explains to the well-meaning individual (who happens to have just as high a net worth as the lottery winner it turns out but has achieved this over time and will have a higher net worth going forward from here) that perhaps this well-meaning simpleton just don't realize how much money has just been won.

And sure, an application like Microsoft Word that has been actively developed for more than 35 years will likely have bloat, especially when maintained to preserve backward compatibility. There's a statistical minimum in this regard. Whether or not the bloat is as bad as it needs to be is another thing.

If the development team behind Word has simply been adding 500MB here and 500MB there and defending it with "we're not going to write the new features in assembly" or "this helps me as a programmer be more productive" or "this source modification is so large because of all the features you don't know about" or "what?! we're not in North Korea" or all of the above, they are 100% creating more work for themselves and this extra work definitely comes with a price tag. In fact, without really have much insight into the general culture or incentives over there, it's a reasonable bet they've taken steps to prevent developers from introducing tech debt and bloat with this sort of defense.

Either way, it's weird to point to Microsoft Word's accumulated debt and overall decreasing performance specs as a result of multiple decades of evolving development as a reason to dismiss bloat as a non-issue. If I were a career non-bloat advocate, traveling from university to university on my canola oil powered moped I'd be pointing to Word as a reason to take bloat seriously and a reminder that the feature your adding now will likely be on the opposing force of a future person's battle with bloat and you should fight it with all the flower power you can muster or risk them tracking you down with a vendetta after they realize it was your commit making their job shit right now.