I think it would be more productive to define tech in terms of "constant size vs variable size". Small is relative, but constant is constant, and the lie that i

I think it would be more productive to define tech in terms of "constant size vs variable size". Small is relative, but constant is constant, and the lie that is particularly enabling of bloat is that we scale between "zero and any amount" of something: any amount of data in a file, any size or color depth in an image, any number of parameters in a function call, any number of APIs, any number of processes, and so on. This is both a question of the memory/storage quantities and the amount of compute being done - when you vary both, you end up with complexity in terms of resource management. Computers today do routinely scale to quantities so large that it seems like "any," but they are not good human-interface scales. Old and constant tended to be the case because the design was overtly burdened by the additional logic needed for variability, but the way that we engineer and program computers now tries very hard to do variable-everything, from the system power management on upwards to the top-level presentation.