It is the nature of idealists that they see the world idealized. Smalltalk-80 itself has nearly 30 kSLOC (the low-level code for the VM adds another 5 to 10 kSLOC); it's just more difficult to count, but I wrote tools which can do it (https://github.com/rochus-keller/Smalltalk/).
But if we're really going to compare stuff.. Systemd alone is over 1 million lines. Probably X/Wayland as well. And the not-slim QT is probably going to end up over 1 million lines soon enough. There is a reason why this slim version exists.
That's at least two orders of magnitude difference in complexity. Maybe there's no getting around it but one has got to wonder whether things went horribly wrong somewhere.
For the people who are comfortable with even less, it's worth comparing it to the 1991 Ceres Oberon System, which has less than 14 kSLOC including the compiler and TUI.