Software is absolutely getting worse. I think you need to go back in time and really consider whether the SW is "doing a lot more."

The valid excuses for some of the footprint these days are bad protocols (but you pretty much have to use them - JSON is an abomination for resource use), Unicode, and higher resolution assets. There is actually very little else that's driving it other than horrible coding.

One way you can tell is that performance SW hasn't really bloated the way desktop and mobile software has. Postgres? Still pretty tiny and scales as you'd expect. Compilers? Even Excel isn't a huge pig the way the electron apps are.

Slack is so bad it is actually hard to think of a software application that is worse, and barely does anything more than most other, lighter-weight applications of the same sort.