Have you seen the WebRTC code? It's 1.1 million lines of gnarly C++. It's cool in terms of features, but that's the essence of bloat. One of the reasons Safari was built off of khtml in the first place was manageable code size.
I specifically didn't focus on the one example given.
Safari is now the "third best browser" behind Chrome and Firefox, looking at this through the prism of adopting web standards. That's irritating, especially when Webkit did so much to push standards forward.
I don't disagree at all about Safari lagging behind — like I just said. It also seems like this has got worse lately — but I suspect a lot of that is down to the Blink fork, and the subsequent reorganisation that is taking place.
I expect this will get a little better soon, otherwise it's a valid point that web developers will start complaining more and harder.
They have shown no interest in Web Components.
They have shown no interest in WebRTC.
They have shown no interest in Service Workers.
They have very little ES6 support.
Let's not focus on the one example given in the article, this is a pattern.