I'll assume you're talking about systemd here? How is linux being strangled? How is it Europe's fault? As far as I can see linux is booming and almost ubiquitous as far as backend OS's go...
Operating systems reflect the cultures that created them. UNIX was a reaction to the enormous overcomplexity of Multics and other operating systems (OS/360) of its day. One file type, one record type ("THE BYTE"),one device driver model, NFA research (~1 pattern language vs zero in other operating systems) and a way to plug together pipeline programs on the command line not seen before.
UNIX succeeded precisely because it was powerful and yet so simple a person could read any part of it and change it.
However, the kernel of UNIX is now beyond ken for most developers precisely because the developers pursued complexity and marginal features for marginal benefits, something very common in European governments and a part of that culture.
The shell commands went from maybe 50kloc to millions of lines precisely because the Linux developers were desperate for contributions and let MIT bloatware people control that part of the source code, strangling Linux with MIT culture.
Kernels do a lot now that they didn't used to. I'm not sure what marginal features you're talking about, can you share some with us? The ABI may look the same as it was in the 1990's but thing under the hood have gotten a lot smarter, and that smarts requires more code.
As for userland.. Even OpenBSD, my personal preference of operating system and one which is known for its 'lean'ness of base userland has 10x this kloc in /bin/ and /usr/bin:
# find bin usr.bin | egrep '\.c$|\.h$' | xargs wc -l | tail -1
689562 total
The only way that makes sense is if they're referring to Lennart being German, but that's kind of a bullshit argument because SystemD was not some novel idea; launchd was around first and came from the American west coast.
No this is not a rant about systemd. The idea behind UNIX was a small set of lego building blocks that could be plugged together to construct something way larger than the parts themselves. The idea in Linux is that once you become an open source contributor more software is always better and more features is always better and hey why doesn't everyone build a monolith with 150 subcommands, which does not interoperate with any other software, and this describes most of the software built for Linux in the past 10 years.
I once worked on a project at Qualcomm and wondered if the head had any idea what he was doing. I went to him and asked what is the complexity of a change you are willing to put up with for a 1% increase in cellular sector throughput. He had no idea. I should have quit the next day. The project was a commercial failure (802.20). Too big and late to market. Same problem that killed CISC machines. Most Linux developers never think in these terms and hence, long term, Linux is dead.
UNIX succeeded precisely because it was powerful and yet so simple a person could read any part of it and change it.
However, the kernel of UNIX is now beyond ken for most developers precisely because the developers pursued complexity and marginal features for marginal benefits, something very common in European governments and a part of that culture.
The shell commands went from maybe 50kloc to millions of lines precisely because the Linux developers were desperate for contributions and let MIT bloatware people control that part of the source code, strangling Linux with MIT culture.