Definitely to some extent, but I think the cruft would have a much smaller effect. Much of it was dead code - commented out, whole files not actually compiled,

Definitely to some extent, but I think the cruft would have a much smaller effect. Much of it was dead code - commented out, whole files not actually compiled, code ifdefed out, or bits of code only compiled on platforms that nobody has used this decade etc. It was making maintainability a nightmare and making it a lot harder to find bugs, but I don't think it would have had a huge performance impact.