Still needs to be read from disk/flash, for the kernel to know it exists. And more relevantly every module has a number of dependencies that will all contribute to size/boot times in their own way.
Maybe even milliseconds is giving it too much, but bloat is really important especially near the release of new hardware.
I imagine the last thing anyone was worried about in crunch time was if they enabled enough random hardware in their config file.
How unloaded kernel module can slow boot time?
Still needs to be read from disk/flash, for the kernel to know it exists. And more relevantly every module has a number of dependencies that will all contribute to size/boot times in their own way.
Maybe even milliseconds is giving it too much, but bloat is really important especially near the release of new hardware.
I imagine the last thing anyone was worried about in crunch time was if they enabled enough random hardware in their config file.
They disabled them to save boot time.