Often, things don't get bloated because the developers are bored, it stems from users requesting features because they are doing it wrong.

Sort of how AWS keeps mucking with Lambdas so that thier customers can keep doing it wrong and paying too much.

Or how doctors just give patients scips if they ask about a drug and it won't incur them any liability.

Over and over I have seen the world shout the praises of a new paradigm that solves a problem...except they totally misunderstand the concept and run in an unintended direction. No one can fight that momentum. So they don't. It happens with nearly everything in tech.

I still remember the Parcel or Prettier saga. The first, the no-configuration bundler, the other, the no-configuration opinionated code formatter.

Then, for their next big major release, the big feature was adding configuration to make it even more powerful!

I haven't used them in a while so my memory might be hazy, but this is exactly the phenomenon you've described. I wonder if it's insecurity or trying to please the crowd that simple niche tools in the frontend end up being configurability behemoths. There's always a time in a JS library where someone decides to rewrite the whole thing and add plugin support, and that's the time that library goes to shit.

Over long enough time you get Webpack, with more knobs than the Linux kernel, and cycles back to a version that tries to be smart and not require any configuration anymore, like 1.0 did.

Well. Life moves in waves, but historically, over a long enough time frame (and if we manage not to kill ourselves), more lessons will be learned than lost, and life gets increasingly better.

React is coming up on 10 years since its release. That world you describe is far from reality nowadays.