I thought the headline meant that this was going to present Signal as an example of the bloat, but it's the reverse: the article says Signal has only 50 employees but still successfully operates a major communications service, where other companies have thousands of employees.
Apart from Signal just generally doing a good job here, I see a few other possible factors:
* Signal doesn't see user content, so it doesn't have a content moderation team
* Signal is designed in such a way that it can't comply with most kinds of legal requests for user data, so it doesn't need a large team responding to those requests
* Signal gets some amount of pro-bono legal help, so it might not have as large an in-house legal team as other organizations
* Signal isn't trying to directly profit from user activity, so it doesn't need to study user activity or engagement metrics with a view towards profiting from them; similarly, it doesn't need to manage relationships with advertisers
* Similarly, it doesn't need to try hard to grow its user base (that would be desirable, but it doesn't necessarily increase revenue much)
* Similarly, it probably doesn't need to try hard to expand into other business areas
(I think these things are generally great. Yay Signal!)
Apart from Signal just generally doing a good job here, I see a few other possible factors:
* Signal doesn't see user content, so it doesn't have a content moderation team
* Signal is designed in such a way that it can't comply with most kinds of legal requests for user data, so it doesn't need a large team responding to those requests
* Signal gets some amount of pro-bono legal help, so it might not have as large an in-house legal team as other organizations
* Signal isn't trying to directly profit from user activity, so it doesn't need to study user activity or engagement metrics with a view towards profiting from them; similarly, it doesn't need to manage relationships with advertisers
* Similarly, it doesn't need to try hard to grow its user base (that would be desirable, but it doesn't necessarily increase revenue much)
* Similarly, it probably doesn't need to try hard to expand into other business areas
(I think these things are generally great. Yay Signal!)