I'm not sure that's an applicable term here. I see "dependency bloat" as an application having a lot of unnecessary dependencies, like when I start a basic proj

I'm not sure that's an applicable term here. I see "dependency bloat" as an application having a lot of unnecessary dependencies, like when I start a basic project skeleton in Hot Javascript Framework of the Week and get 1,000 dependencies loaded in (which, in npm land, is a conservative number; I felt bad about saying 10,000 but from what I've seen it isn't necessarily far off the mark). But when you have a project that really does touch every XWindows library there is, and really does need to know about every major image format, and really does speak every major network protocol, and runs a full JIT interpreter and compiler, and integrates with every OS security mechanism there is, and uses every build protection library it can find, and on and on... well, better those dependencies than re-implementation of all that from scratch. Fortunately, there aren't very many things nowadays other than a browser that has that characteristic. (Office suites, maybe. QT and other similar things considered as a whole, but not necessarily what any given user of QT will need.)