In what way is ipfs a monster? It is a single go binary that does a tiny number of jobs.
I can run Quiet in the background all day on my Pixel 6 and we haven't even started optimizing for battery life yet.
~/kubo$ find . -name \*.go | xargs wc -l | tail -1
59629 total
Doesn't seem that big? ~/irssi$ find . -name \*.[ch] | xargs wc -l | tail -1
88551 total
https://github.com/irssi/irssiObviously ipfs doesn't have the chat UI, ipfs is just a protocol layer.
But it is a more complicated protocol than IRC, so you'd expect it to be larger. I don't think it's large out of proportion, certainly not large enough to call it a "MONSTER software".