It's not wrong per-se, but they practice it to a level of extreme that it seems more like a principled art piece than usable software. Software engineering is all about knowing your project-specific constraints, it should not be wasteful - and that goes for runtime performance / memory usage as much as the time invested. Usability is another factor - suckless software is very inaccessible to people who don't know how to use a compiler by default.

> (I know, I'm a horrible person)

You made a throwaway just for that? I'd hope most people are capable of differentiating the engineering ideology from the (ironic?) nazi reference and tiki torch march ideology bit.