Minimalism is often a fantasy. If you want to make a great product for the end user you often have to much more engineering work in the backend to give the illusion of simplicity. You can click on any link to open a website, but there is a tremendous amount of complexity behind the scenes (DNS, TCP/IP, HTTP, SSL, routing) to make it all work. The abstraction is simple for the user, but complicated in reality. All of these individual technologies can (and perhaps should be) simpler and more minimalistic, but the totality of the stack is inherently complicated because it solves a hard complicated problem.

Suppose you want to make a new graphics app. Do you want users to easily create beautifully typeset documents? Then you'll have to do a ton of schleppy hard work to give the user the option to bend/morph/scale graphics to their taste. A "minimalist" graphics program isn't any good because then the designer won't be able to create what they have in their mind.

Code isn't written for other people. Code is written so the end user ends up with a great product that solves their problems. If you're lucky the code is minimalistic and beautiful, but usually you'll have to struggle through one schleppy problem after another to give users the features and performance they desire.