IMO, such debates are mainly fueled by language biases. Reading the introduction to the paper “Linguistic Relativity and Programming Languages” can be helpful to try and rid oneself of these.
Here’s a quote from the foreword of the book “Using OpenMP” which kind of explains the reason for what you call “bloat”,
The great paradox of programming languages is that as they become popular and evolve, they become more complex and easier to use, at the same time. Simplicity comes from specialization - features that make somethings very natural and easy, e.g. parallelizing a recursive function in OpenMP. Complexity has two sources: needs of expert users for more control to extract the best performance, and just the sheer size of the language as more interdependent features are added. With success comes complexity! Over time, fewer and fewer people understand the fullness and intricacies of each language, yet the language fills the needs of many.