If there is board work, at that point i'm playing with making the board work.
I started with platformio's zephyr support and then moved to clion as platformio kind of died.
I have never, and would never, try to use west as the main build system of my project directly.
As for bloat/compilation speed, i guess it all depends on what you are trying to use it for. As per the other thread - if you are trying to use it as "an RTOS that is a less hacky version of arduino stuff", i think it works great.
If you are trying to use it for "i have meaningful hardware constraints and need to keep track of every byte", i doubt it would work well compared to FreeRTOS.
I think the limit is probably "i am using nordic boards to develop bluetooth stuff".
I do agree they try to sell it for a lot of things.