A lot of it boils down to developer time and the cost of that time. Back in the days when Visual Basic first arrived on the scene, it was competing with C/C++ and the big knock against it was that you could write Hello World in ANSI C for Windows in maybe 15K and with VB, you always had the albatross of the 300K runtime library. Now, you could 10x the size of your VB program and it would still be just a few K more, but 10x the size of your C/C++ program and you're looking at a few MONTHS more development. In the end the bloat of your applications is a small price to pay for the huge leaps in development production, reduction in price and sheer vastness of capabilities that would have never been possible in the old hand-crafted days of development when programs were small and fast but also weak, incompatible with each other, under-featured and costly to develop.

A lot of it boils down to developer time and the cost of that time. Back in the days when Visual Basic first arrived on the scene, it was competing with C/C++ and the big knock against it was that you could write 'Hello World' in ANSI C for Windows in maybe 15K. The problem with VB was you always had the albatross of the 300K runtime library. 

Now, you could 10x the size of your VB program and it would still be just a few K more, but 10x the size of your C/C++ program and you're looking at a few MONTHS more development. 

In the end the bloat of your applications is a small price to pay for the huge leaps in development production, reduction in price and sheer vastness of capabilities that would have never been possible in the old hand-crafted days of development; when programs were small and fast but also weak, incompatible with each other, under-featured and costly to develop.