Being understaffed really limits your ability to do stuff, and it also sucks for the people you do have. (Source: I live this every day of my working life.) Also, by the time you're in this spot you should have hired already, and digging your way out will be so costly in terms of forfeited opportunity and the strain on existing employees when spinning up new ones. While on the other hand, if you don't grow your customer base you're gonna go out of business anyway.

It's very easy to look at a going concern from the outside and say "what are all those people doing?!" The definition of bloat is not "things I didn't think a company would have to deal with because I don't work there".