It's difficult to justify calling WordPress bloated when it's just some 200k lines of code and most theme/plugin files are only a couple dozen to hundreds thems

It's difficult to justify calling WordPress bloated when it's just some 200k lines of code and most theme/plugin files are only a couple dozen to hundreds themselves. Compare that to the kinds of frameworks people recommend for starting modern PHP projects yourself, and WordPress is tiny. Symfony for example is 900k lines of code before you've even written "Hello World". Other CMS's are, too, typically much larger than WordPress (e.g. Drupal Core is over 5 times larger).