> HTML has become more and more bloated. How many methods do we need to do something that was possible back in the 90s?

This is incorrect. Lots of old stuff was removed or deprecated from the HTML5 specification; elements like `s`, `u` were repurposed from being presentational to semantic:

- acronym

- applet

- basefont

- big

- center

- dir

- font

- frame

- frameset

- isindex

- noframes

- s

- strike

- tt

- u

- xmp

- noembed

- plaintext