"OMG, /bin/sh increased in size by 191x from 1974 to 2015!" seems like the byte-counting equivalent of people who lose their minds about "YOUR FOOD HAS CHEMICALS IN IT WITH COMPLICATED NAMES!". Both sound impressive and might make you worry - and both omit important facts that would greatly reduce that effect.

For instance, 191x growth since 1974 seems steep until you realize that the corresponding storage has grown from, say, 10.5MB (capacity of an RL02 for the PDP11) to ~1TB; a scaling of 100000x over the same period. That's not even really comparing apples-to-apples; the RL02 was not the sort of thing you'd have on your desk.