To get a further glimpse into that philosophy check this out: http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/ and recoil in horror as literally everything you've ever used (and sometimes even liked) is deemed harmful. There also used to be some more ahem 'controversial' content which I assume was removed to get with the current times.
Modularity and proper configs produce more lines of code, but it's actually simpler in human terms.
If it helps think of it as how much of programming is dedicated to reducing complexity, breaking things down, abstracting to core components, etc.
I do use a lot of suckless utilities but from personally experience running Alpine as a daily driver for ~3 months I can't in good conscience recommend a MUSL distribution, despite the fact that in my opinion Alpine does everything else right.
Aside from that, suckless software just sucks. Software is more than just source code; it's the user experience, it's the community, it's what comes out of that software. The Blender source code certainly wouldn't fulfill the suckless vision (in sofar as one even exists) and yet it's infinitely more important and useful than any piece of suckless software. Showing off your minimalist desktop on /r/unixporn or /g/ is fun and all but eventually you're going to want to do real work with your computer and realize how much time you've wasted recompiling C code to make basic configuration changes.