> What does "Qt is bloated" even mean.From a user perspective I remember that being a big thing some time ago when people didn't have anything already using Qt installed did an “apt install” or “yum install” on something that did and saw the small tool they were wanting was going to drag half a desktop environment in with it as dependencies. The same could likely be said for GTK in reverse, I'm not sure what their relative sizes for similar features are these days.
Some use bloated to mean the memory footprint. IIRC GTK has more of a reputation for eating RAM than Qt, but again maybe people notice a single Qt app using a lot of resource (that would be shared if running multiple apps against the same libs) when it is the only one they run.
As you suggest, just stating that “ is bloated” without reference to some details of what is meant by that, sounds a bit like someone parroting old information and/or group-think rather than having looked into it recently.
Having said that the author has a minimal dependency stance in order to try to maintain a small footprint for the app (“I avoid unnecessary abstractions.” in the section about keeping things small) so any framework that isn't little more than a cosmetic wrapper could legitimately be called more bloated than using nothing at all and talking more directly to the standard OS libs. Also in context (discussing why the product is not cross-platform and is never likely to be) this is not the only reason being given and probably not the most significant one (there may be significant selection of cross-platform issues beyond the UI framework).
The key to a lot of what is in that document is the “It’s my project and I act like it” part. All too often we forget this very important side of things, especially with one-man or small-team projects, and people comment on project decisions as if using the product gives some automatic expectation that the creator will mould it around the needs/wants of a given user or someone's idea of “the community”. For an open source project the community has the option of forking the project or offering to fund the changes they want that aren't otherwise on the creator's roadmap (though obviously the larger the project, the less practical these options may be)…