Examples of feature creep? Sure. Rust is a good example. Anytime we deprecate a functioning C program with a Rust one, or add a Rust dependency somewhere, we also deprecate older hardware which can't cope with it, and make those machines useless.

Let's not even mention Electron, at least it won't work on NetBSD and OpenBSD, which prevents a lot of bloat.

Most Linux folks won't care about resource usage because they purposefully use powerful machines with gigs of memory, which hides inefficiencies.

NetBSD does the opposite, they purposefully test and develop the system on small, constrained hardware, whether new (ARM SBCs) or old (VAX stations, 486s and alike). But we can't fork the whole userland, so when Linux moves to large, bloated layers, it compromises a lot of efforts to keep the userland tight and fit.