Nowadays it does the same with being very defensive of complexity and adding features just for the sake of it. They actively remove features and technically break standards to reduce surface. So while the phrase might be dated the whole idea of doing the minimal thing to provide minimal attack surface is something that some other projects could very much benefit from. Especially in times where people use LLMs that happily write ten classes instead of a simple five line function everyone can easily understand and verify.
Also I think it simply became a bit of a meme and like with the art and music it became a bit of a project culture thing. Don't overanalyze it. It's a joke like "days since last accident" and how Shodan is a video game reference and firewall probably came from some fantasy nerd. Hey, the term sharding came from a video game as well!