> Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that).

> a… personal financial management application… about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline

Just how much functionality are you getting out of that? It's hard for me to imagine that people want that much out of such a program. I just keep a spreadsheet. (Yes, LibreOffice is also very bloated.)