Ironically, much of the codebase bloat I've seen in recent years has come from super-hackers who want to gain experience with all the new frameworks and services on the market.
A prime example is hiring a front-end wizard to rebuild sites in React, just because React is the new hotness. That engineer gets to put "Replaced legacy website with all-new React codebase" on their resume and pivot into the next job.
At my previous employer, one of the teams had a front-end that had become an unholy conglomeration of React and Angular, simply because the engineers were afraid their skills would fall behind if they didn't keep up with React. It was a mess.
Ironically, hiring developers who care more about getting the job done tends to choose the path of least resistance forward, which means sticking with frameworks, languages, and services that may not be the trendiest, but they get the job done.