The Legend of Irreplaceable Developer

It kind of is though. We have dead code elimination. Bloated stuff is popular and therefore probably optimized. Half of the "Bloat" is probably for a useful purpose, like being able to decode some non compliant file format that doesn't exist but very much does and will continue to.

Plus, if you're not just building with Legos, you might have stuff only 10xers or at least 2xers can do.

I'm not convinced the current software based society is possible with much less bloat than we have, unless incentives change and we free up resources by dropping some projects. The world only has so many excellent developers.