Comment by marcan_42

Resources and copypasta.

Today's apps are meant for things like 4K screens and have graphical resources to match.

Then, everyone loves to bundle in third-party frameworks and libraries, which bloat individual apps and cannot be shared.

If you look at the actual application logic code, it has grown much more reasonably in proportion to apps 20 years ago. It's just that there's a lot more junk tagging along with it. If you look at typical Linux packages, where library reuse is still the norm (though perhaps not for long, with containers...), you'll find fairly sensibly sized binaries.

Modern Linux kernels don't fit on floppies any more, but if you look at the actual code in there... there's good reasons for it to exist (and of course you can compile time disable a lot of it, though probably not enough to get it small enough for a floppy any more). Complexity is unfortunately necessary for things to work and perform well on modern systems (e.g. think of how much more complicated things got once SMP/multicore became the norm).