I wouldn't call that bloat; certainly we've been complaining about software bloat as long as I've been into computers, but at that time, software was simply pushing the capabilities of the hardware, and often running into walls.

These days, we value developer productivity over performance optimization, so we have stuff like Electron apps. The reason behind it is that CPUs (and RAM quantity, for the most part) are so far ahead of regular desktop applications that it doesn't matter. In the 80s and 90s, the hardware could barely keep up with decently-optimized software that wanted to do anything interesting.