Yeah, I understand this becomes necessary to minimize maintenance effort on rarely used features,but it feels like even more often it's used to turn useful applications into barren wastelands. Firefox, perhaps the best example, is a fraction of what it used to be.

This may be a noble goal but then it may also lead to the program never being updated. If you need to do a major update (underlying system library no longer works, dependency is deprecated and has a security hole, a new direction requires overhaul of backend) you may need to prioritise what to keep and what to let go.

A problem I encountered was also localisation. Once you localise your program, adding any string is exponential work. In this case removing features can give you a lot of slack.