This is actually institutional for Microsoft. Years ago, when I was developing using Visual Studio and it came on a set of CDs, I saw an article claiming that installing it and MSDN (their offline help system of tech notes since the dawn of time) made you feel like Godzilla had shit on your hard drive.
It took up an outrageous amount of storage. The same was true for shrink-wrapped Office.
I think the difference here is that the OS and full versions of Office are installed with no preconfiguration, whereas the complaints you're referring to were about installing the full version of VS and MSDN including all sample code, lengthy documents, help and test binaries would necessarily take up a large amount of space back then.
It took up an outrageous amount of storage. The same was true for shrink-wrapped Office.