Some people still write code that is compiled.
Care to give some examples of this? I've been using compiled languages for a while now and I've never felt my environment had been "bloated".
In other words it has nothing to do with how bloated the dev environment is and more with the fact that some programming languages have features that can cause excessive build time.
Opening a shell, reloading a page, switching tabs, running git pull, decompressing an archive, linting, building etc.
All these things will take noticably longer to the point of being frustrating on a low-end machine.