In an alternate reality, high-level languages would be wired directly into our "hardware", via microcode or FPGA's or what have you. Software systems would be designed first, then the circuitry. In this alternate reality, Intel did not monopolize decades doubling down on clock speed so that we wouldn't have time to notice the von Neumann bottleneck. Apologies to Alan Kay. [0]
We should look at the "bloat" needed to implement higher-level languages as a downside of the architecture, not of the languages. The model of computing that we've inherited is just one model, and while it may be conceptually close to an abstract Turing machine, it's very far from most things that we actually do. We should not romanticize instruction sets; they are an implementation detail.
I'm with you in the spirit of minimalism. But that's the point: if hardware vendors were not so monomaniacally focused on their way of doing things, we might not need so many adapter layers, and the pain that goes with them.