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I allow that there may be something philosophically fulfilling here, or an attempt to correct for certain unavoidable ills of complexity (if a a poor attempt), but again that's an incredibly, incredibly narrow thing to talk about presented as ubiquitously applicable.
I use:
Trisquel GNU/Linux
IntelliJ 2019.3
Perl, PGP, and text files
About 20 different web browsers
My own web-based information manager
And yes, I sometimes use Word 97 for writing.
And I'm pretty happy with it.
How many times "I just wanted to download one file" on a windows 98 machine. The only "solution" is to maintain a proxy running a modern OS that renders modern web as image maps.
As for Word 97,I remember when it was new. I also remember when Microsoft went to the "new" ribbon interface (it was much later, 2016 perhaps?) I hated it, my users hated it... Fast forward a decade and last time I tried to use pre-ribbon office product It was extremely inconvenient to use. I don't know if it is due to high dpi screens or something else. This and lack of good dictionaries is the main reason why I continue to pay for MS office instead of using Libre office (or one of ancient office products I own) for example.
Except for the web browsers, none of the things you listed are the result of or otherwise benefited from meaningful forks.
You will never understand, much less be able to make meaningful edits in afternoon to, the entire Linux kernel. Likely much the same for Perl and PGP (150K lines of C and a highly specialized domain respectively).
You don't have the tools to edit IntelliJ or Word 97 (was that what that bullet point was about?)
Lord help you if you're updating any of those things. I better not see anything higher than 2.X in your uname -a.
You overwhelmingly don't follow this post's advice
That said, the author's point about the trustworthiness of software is valid. In most cases software is more complex than individual users need it to be (and it is like that to serve a wider audience since software development is expensive). The complexity makes the software more vulnerable while making it easy to hide malicious intent.
I think there's something valid in your second, but on the whole simplicity is often a myth. Hardware is complex, the world is complex, the software stack simply reflects these complexities, it does not invent them.
It feels great to have simple code until your environment no longer mirrors that code's assumptions. You have an MBR bootloader that assumes the A20 line is on the keyboard controller, upgrade hardware, and suddenly you can't boot anymore, bet you wish you had a more complex bootloader now. You have a graphics renderer that knows no one has more than 4GB of VRAM so it measures allocatable memory by allocating up to 4GB of textures until it gets E_OUT_OF_MEM. Except on modern cards it overflows its texture counter, bet you wish you had a more complex renderer.
And this is ignoring inherent complexity, or the nature of handling errors even without changing hardware, but I've ranted enough on this. There is a narrowly valid point here but it is presented without caveat and thus far too broadly.
Once you learn Groff+Mom+simple files cat'ted after.FOOBAR tags you wont go back.
What do you think the point is?
At what point was your "little effort" claim true? Compiling random OSS projects has never been particularly easy. You've always needed to hunt down all the compile-time dependencies and get those compiled/installed.