It was a little more than that. It was the only app on the live CD of several major distros that relied on Mono. That meant, back in the days of CD's that could hold 800 MB (?) you had to remove a whole lot of other stuff from the live CD, all for an app that most people didn't use. (As was pointed out at the time, what's the purpose of a notes app on a live CD, where you don't even have persistent storage?) It was widely perceived, correctly in my opinion, as a way to get Mono installed on everyone's machines. After the pushback Miguel de Icaza got pissed, trashed Linux every chance he had, and switched to Mac. I'm not going to relitigate all of that, but it wasn't just that Mono was bloated.

* Here's just one link: https://tirania.org/blog/archive/2013/Mar-05.html

"Machine would suspend and resume without problem, WiFi just worked, audio did not stop working, I spent three weeks without having to recompile the kernel to adjust this or that, nor fighting the video drivers, or deal with the bizarre and random speed degradation that my ThinkPad suffered."