The Unix principle is the most over-rated design principle ever. It's sole purpose is to be dragged out when somebody doesn't like your application. Notably the systemd haters don't levy the same complaint about Wayland...

It's based on the idea of programs as "functions" that can be strung together like you often do with things like "cat /etc/passwd | grep user | tr 's/:/,/'" (cat put in there to trigger the right people). That's a great philosophy for cli utilities. But it's not universally applicable.

The goal is not to make things tiny but to make them "the right size." You wouldn't want to run 30 different applications to do what GIMP does and you shouldn't have to.

And the idea of having dozens of viable replacements for different functions is not a Unix thing but pretty restricted to the Linux ecosystem. And it's not like it was planned, it just happened because 12 people went out and wrote their own ntp daemons. There wasn't really much benefit to it. "Oh boy, I can run a different ntpd... And half of them are partially implemented. Hooray?"