Yes. The same would apply to other areas as well. For example, a colleague of mine set up this weird elaborate web based data processing thing so that we could automate processing of files. I did the same thing he was trying to achieve with a couple of perl one-liners.

Maybe comparing business card games to AAA is a bad comparison, but comparing 'Return of the Obra Dinn' with 'LA Noire' might be more apt.

Totally agree. The current version of Nethack is ~204k lines of code. Modern AAA games have millions of lines. I don't think there's an order of magnitude more depth to most AAA games than there is in Nethack.

Nethack is 204k lines? That is amazingly bloated for what it is.

With dwarf fortress coming in at 381,764 I feel like it delivers a much higher amount of value/line.

Probably not terribly bloated, just old. The language (C), features (probably K&R C), libraries (pitiful compared to today), and portability concerns (nethack was ported to many platforms, DF comparatively few) it originally had to contend with made for a very different world back then. While I'm sure it's been updated/cleaned up over the decades, it probably still carries a lot of that design/baggage from the time it was written in.

Perhaps... but why must arguments always seem to be made on extreme examples?

How else would you know where the limits are?

Thank you for understanding!