Yes Windows is bloated AF but even Linux Mint has a minimum space requirement of 20G with 100G as the recommendation. Hell just my swapfile wouldn't fit in the largest partition supported by MSDOS 6.22 (2 Gigabytes BTW).
No preemptive multitasking, no 3D support of any kind, no usb or plug and play, no desktop compositing, no web browsing...and the list goes on and on. Desktop environments just do so much more now than in the WfW 3.11 days that a DE install 1,000 times the size of WfW is pretty much normal.
Once, a long time ago, I had to create management reports from a mainframe accounting system, built in-house by someone long since retired. The only way to extract data was to capture a print file and then use an application called Monarch. I seem to recall that came on >20 floppies. I used Crystal Reports a lot, and that had a similar number or perhaps more.