Re: Glad to see
To answer your question, Windows 11, at 3.5 Gbyte, would require 2,431 floppy discs... or 5 to 6 CD-ROMs.
The main reason for what you call “bloat” really is additional functionality, plus resources for multiple languages and higher-definition displays. Yes, NT 3.5 came on a handful of disks (the Workstation installer is 25 Mbyte - less than 1% of the size of a Windows 11 install), but: it only just had a TCP/IP stack (built-in TCP was an advertised feature of 3.5!), had no SSH, no web-browser, no support for GPU acceleration (not even a thing back then), no management features, limited graphics drivers, limited command-line shell tools, no assistive technologies, no resources for languages other than English, a handful of fonts (all bitmapped, all Latin-only), and the list goes on...
Then there’s resources: I remember back in 2001, a friend noting that the 256x256 RGBA icon file he had just included in his MacOS X app bundle was larger than the entire system ROM of the original Macintosh (in the System 6 days, the Macintosh OS was mostly in ROM; the System disk added the localisable resources and additional machine-specific drivers) Higher resolution displays with more colours means every graphical element gets bigger.
The install isn’t what’s loaded, though. Resources and libraries don’t get loaded until they’re actually needed, so startup times are not much longer between 7 and 11: you can find out how fast Windows 7 loads on modern hardware by using a VM - it really isn’t significantly faster than 10/11. If you want to see just how I/O bound the OS startup process is, load something like Win 3.1 or Mac System 7.x from SSD on a modern emulator. Back in the days of MacOS 8 on spinning disks, I used to turn on my Mac in the morning, then go to the coffee machine, because there was no point in staring at icons appearing along the bottom of the screen for two minutes. I launched the same OS on an emulator recently, and the whole thing sprang to life in three seconds!