There is a small irony here in the author's use of histogram plotting that performs meaningless perspective rendering - one of the features that has contributed to document-creation software bloat.
Perspective is not an expensive feature and I really doubt it would contribute significally to code inflation.
Start using libraries for a tiny feature without consider the whole size impact is what is driving code inflation. Now and then I find a very tiny project which executable is big just because they are linking again Boost for just one couple of classes.
I am sure you are right about the big picture. Library inclusion has leverage, and library code is written for the general case. Templates provide a way to specialize the code that is built, but I imagine that cross-cutting concerns ultimately limit the degree to which you can create generic code that compiles to exactly what you want, and nothing more.
In practice it is not very modular, parts of the library like Asio are so dependent to other parts in boost, and given that bootstrapping can be an annoyance at times, I have seen a los of project that decided to include the whole library.
Start using libraries for a tiny feature without consider the whole size impact is what is driving code inflation. Now and then I find a very tiny project which executable is big just because they are linking again Boost for just one couple of classes.