I think it belongs in the category of self-licking ice cream cone. The more bloated it gets the more stakeholders there are wanting it to get more bloated.

The same thing drives government bureaucracy growth and the ridiculous amount of administrative overhead at universities. At the root I think a lot of this kind of thing is a kind of unplanned jobs program.

I also think a related sort of dynamic might drive complexity growth in software. Every layer and every feature has stakeholders and people employed to maintain it, and all those people become defenders of all these things.

One of the factors behind “worse is better” in software and systems engineering might be that worse employs more people. Clean well thought out systems are not inefficient enough to create large communities around them because they don’t need enough babysitting.