When utorrent came out it was considered a major improvement over its bloated competitors. Bloated software has existed as far back as it reasonably could exist. Consider for example Niklaus Wirth's "A Plea for Lean Software" [1] written in 1995 (for a recent discussion on HN see [2]).

[1]: https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/Articles/LeanSoftware.pdf [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24059704