this is sad

They're comparing pathological cases, apps which have been decades in writing, with lots of specific private code, and which have been forced to sanitize their requirements due to years of distro pressures.

That's pretty much the ideal case for flatpack or snap (I suspect just taking apache openoffice instead of libreoffice would be quite less rosy).

Even there they have ~ 30% of wastage.

That's the usual "trade dev convenience for everyone else's" and "cargo cult windows/apple/android to win market share¹" (the only change is who is being cargo culted, usually via themes of other superficial things)

It will probably end with the usual "dev does not understand why no one follows him".

I just hope they won't damage too much the platform in the meantime.

¹ Years of efforts poured in the Linux desktop, with lavish use of distro gifts and exceptions, have produced little in terms of market share. Meanwhile the people who focused on doing their own thing instead of aping the mistakes of others have actually found their way to people homes (in appliances, in owncloud, etc). With things like Office 365 and skype Microsoft is actually on the way to the network desktop that could have been done years ago Linux side if people had not focused on burying its *nix network heritage and copying every half-hassed network-ignorant Microsoft or Apple tech they could find out.