What did the Unix tradition of composability though pipes produce though that was more complex than grep, to put it in an exaggerated form? It sorta seems that the classical Unix approach breaks down for big tasks, hence in practice big programs do not follow it. "...and the eulogy was delivered by Perl", as Pike put it.
It's a bit crazy to call Emacs bloated these days; vim is big, too, so is Eclipse, so are most useful programs. I don't like Emacs one bit, but its size is the last thing that bothers me.
> What did the Unix tradition of composability though pipes produce though that was more complex than grep, to put it in an exaggerated form?
netpbm?
Actually, once upon a time, there was a web browser called "Chimera", it used external commands to handle many types of files. For example, it used djpeg to load inline JPEG images.
Plenty of monolithic software runs on modern Unices, but very few can be traced back to a tradition of monoliths.