Well, you can add bloat by inlining it too, if it's repeated many times. I thought bloat was for unused code loaded as a side effect to code that one actually depends on, for example, as a part of a big library. That makes a huge difference if you are targeting the client side.

I mean, you could also have it as a helper function in your project but that decreases the re-usability to copy-pasting across projects.

In the end, effective or not, I can see it as an attempt on reducing bloat. I see that many don't agree, but I'm afraid they don't take into account the constraints imposed by sending code to the clients rather than a binary.