Bloat can also mean a program that does 1000 things and you use only a few things of it. Or if you have one application that loads ton of stuff into RAM just to watch a video. Another day you load the same application to edit a source code, but it still loads ton of stuff into RAM. That one application in this case is the bloat, even if its used regularly. The threshold of bloat, even if the definition is the same, is also different for every person to person. That adds up to the confusion or misunderstanding.
After the discussions with him, I think he is just trolling (lime!). At one point, his suggestion was no need for an entire operating system, other than the Kernel and a Browser.