There might be something in what you are saying but it's not really like that.
The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight, fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches, endless network services, launch services, anti-malware background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics, cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression, energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting, COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the human body.
Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry... But you just have much more features these days and stability and security increased a lot. If that is not added value for you just work on one of those "minimal" OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time.
One might expect all those extra services and capabilities would make application development faster, though. Less for application developers to worry about, since the OS and built-in services do way more than a typical 1990s OS—and any that aren't helpful, ought at least not be getting in the way. So, sure, the situation for our industry's even more embarrassing than my original post implied.
The current macOS is humungous, kernel aside. There is a variety of systems running under the hood (Spotlight, fsevents, Apple Events, duet, launchd, MIGs, XPCs, caches, endless network services, launch services, anti-malware background programs, AppleID agents, diagnostics, cloud/AppleID integration, auditing, RAM compression, energy management, backups, filesystem snapshotting, COW,.... not to mention that huge OS inside the OS that is the browser) that is more than a surgeon can know about the human body.
Of course most of that is spying on you and telemetry... But you just have much more features these days and stability and security increased a lot. If that is not added value for you just work on one of those "minimal" OSes that appear from time to time. I guarantee you that you will miss a modern "bloaty" OS in no time.