Save the kernel, which is pretty small, yes. Essentially, they realized C wasn't up to the task of writing monoliths, and so they didn't, to keep global complex

Save the kernel, which is pretty small, yes. Essentially, they realized C wasn't up to the task of writing monoliths, and so they didn't, to keep global complexity low. Richard Gabriel argued that this was part of C's success over Lisp in "Lisp: The Good News, The Bad News, And How To Win Big," informally known as the Worse is Better paper.