I hate to be trollbait, but: "the Unix way" is less about the size of programs, and more about programs being built as composable, modular components that interact together over a common interface.

Curious people can read more about it at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_philosophy or https://homepage.cs.uri.edu/~thenry/resources/unix_art/ch01s...

The websocketd site outlines this fairly well with the big quote on their homepage.

Looked at another way, a Unix-like ecosystem satisfies two of the principles of a SOLID software architecture: the Single Responsibility Principle and (arguably) the Open-Closed Principle.

If websocketd focuses on handling the nuts and bolts of websocket connections and invoking other programs and piping data into and out of them over a standard interface, then it's a Unix-like architecture, even if it's a fat, monolithic, statically linked binary.

The unix way is 'decoupled microservices', breaking down components in to small pieces for reuse, it continues to be used and reinvented in different contexts. Both monolith and decoupled components have their cheerleaders but simply dismissing either as 'not a good thing' doesn't add anything to the debate.