Dunno about bloated, but I still say escalating privileges is always going to be less secure than dropping privileges. sudo tries to make sure nobody unauthorized is doing the escalating, but it can't ask a password every time. Comparatively, getty can ask for a password every time, and once logged in as root you can drop to a normal user without a password, then nobody who gets control can do anything ever as root.
I dunno, I haven't had sudo installed for quite a while.
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