You can hate it all you want, but UNIX philosophy isn't related at codebase size at all.

All the examples you give fit into UNIX philosophy rather well. Firefox doesn't do text editing and ffmpeg doesn't render web pages, and vim doesn't transcode videos. They do one thing and do it well. They are as simple as they need to be not more.

Also, if GNU coreutils have a complexity of a banana, why uutils still can't replicate them as-is? Why they had ~140 CVEs in one release despite being written in Rust? If grep is simple, why we have only two performant implementations, grep and ripgrep?

Even FreeBSD guys discussed this: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2010-Aug...

You're simplifying too much, I believe. Try writing a cp clone, why not?

systemd started as a start services in the right order tool, then bloated from there. Being holistic is not the problem, being holistic in the wrong way is.

Now, they decided that DBus is not nice enough and created their own IPC mechanism. What was that? Varlink? They don't stop there even. They say "Hey, why not try Varlink?". So to translate: "We want to kill DBus so, we will force Varlink on you".