So although you're right that providing both simplicity and feature-richness is not free, the companies that can afford both (assuming the features address actual problems, or even just pain points, that customers have) are going to fare better than those that don't.

From the end user's perspective, features often reduce complexity, sometimes dramatically so. Before "mail merge" was a common MS Word feature, collating form letters was a tedious job.

Good engineering and design integrates features into the application in a way that avoids complexity.