Honestly I feel like it's a thing that is becoming better as time goes on. A lot of people say the opposite, but it's the 2010s that things went really south. Electron being the prime offender. A lot of what made bloat maddeningly big is starting to get scaled back.
Electron is very slowly being phased out in favor of Tauri (Electron binary size 127mb compared to Tauri's 6mb). NodeJS is slowly getting phased out in favor of Deno (Lighter, more secure). There's been a trend of re-writing things with Rust which makes things faster and tiny. Most bloated apps now usually have an open source alternative that does the same thing better (see for example OBS as opposed to how I had to fight with my system to record my screen before that)
The reason big tech companies like Microsoft and Facebook are so chalk full of bloat is because they're using old technology, and they're in too deep that they don't have the time to re-write a decade of progress in something else. If you use the right tools nowadays though, I feel like you're likely to get much better results.
Also the trash trend of dynamic languages is also falling out of favor. Took like two decades, but now JS getting replaced with Typescript means the morons writing it will mess up less. Now all we need is a way to make WASM (Web Assembly) viable and we can kiss javascript internet bloat goodbye. I, for one, think it's looking pretty good.
Side note: someone in the comments of that article compared people writing bad code to 1984. Lol.
Other side note: Dude writing this article is the developer of Gratitious Space Battles. Hey, I used to really love that game.