You can squeeze a FORTH kernel into 2K, so 8K really is quite a luxurious size. I actually wrote FORTH code very early in my career and wrote lots of things you might not imagine doing. For example I wrote a 3D star field animation system for a planetarium in FORTH in the late 80's.
I think programmers (especially these days) over estimate how much advantage they get from reusing other packages. Because it becomes so much more difficult to refactor your code when you can't change some interfaces, you may end up with more (or at least more complicated) code than if you wrote something that is tailor made. In languages where you have a lot of facilities available, it is one of the hardest decisions to get right. When you are forced to write everything yourself, then it's easier to get the choice right ;-)