A backdoor in xz

To carry on with niner's point, /boot/vmlinuz-6.7.9-amd64 may be nine megabytes, but /lib/modules/6.7.9-amd64/ is over a hundred. You could read through the kernels of Unix v6 (the Lions book), or xv6, or Minix. Even twenty years ago, the kernel was so big that the SCO mess turned up a copy of Unix malloc buried in kernel that no one had noticed, even though it should have been replaced with standard kernel functions. Should we use a tighter (less functional) kernel that's actually readable? I don't want to give up a lot of the features I use, but there's certainly no one with the headroom to completely understand 140 MB of source code.