Since the word is used mainly as an insult due to people having emotional attachments to technology, the real question in my mind is how did you not find it bizarre on every use.

Or I guess another way to say it is that "bloated" is only a measurement of the speaker's disdain for the software under question. It has little relationship with any actual quality measurement, generally. Bizarre on its face, to me.

Man after years of hearing how bloated Windows is compared to other OSes, I was expecting my first Windows Phone to be the same. But nope to my surprise it was fast and fluid, even on low end devices! I guess, the same can also be said about Win8/Win10 compared to Vista/Win7.

Bloat seems like dirt that accumulates overtime. A little bit of cleanup and optimization can sometimes do magic.

Bloat and legacy support are two sides of the same coin.

Microsoft chose one answer to that, Apple another.

I think Windows Phone is a clear example that Microsoft has technical chops when starting clean, it just lacks business willpower to make decisions that favor performance over support.

Yeah, I would genuinely like to know what all is considered to be bloat within the Unix space. If anyone could point to some information about this I'd be curious.

X11, KDE, GNOME, GCC, Emacs, Mozilla? Any huge project I guess. The GNU command line tools are not as lean as the BSD ones but so what?

They also generally have more (useful) features than the BSD ones.

Not only that but they include more documentation inside the binary. Someone also pointed out to me one time that some features in some GNU utils are only possible to have if they are implemented in the binary, rather as a separate program.

Well, generally speaking nothing is impossible, but it's often more efficient to put the extra features in the same binary. However this "bloat" is nothing compared to your typical desktop or programming environment.