The people who actually pay for slack and discord (eg enterprises that need workplace chat app and decided to go with the "gold standard", consumers with discord servers and such) need the features/tradeoffs choosing featuers over efficiency causing that bloat. They just don't all need the exact same set of those features as the other customers. So because customers are willing to pay for all these features the product tries to ship all of them and becomes bloated.
> Every person I talked to that uses Excel hate how slow it is
But do they make the purchasing decisions behind using Excel?
To be clear I am not really arguing that bloat/overly enterprisey products are good. What I mean that you don't see the world exploding with more elegant products now with agents for the same reason you didn't see the world exploding with them before agents either: the people who pay for those products and build them for a living are not incentivized or necessarily even rewarded for choosing to make them more efficient or elegant when there are other things that customers are asking for with more $$$ behind them.