Purportedly Twitter has 20M LoC Scala. Scala is a JVM language that is somewhat more concise than Java. IDK how much of that is unit tests, documentation, and acceptance tests. Anyway style, programming language and culture matter. Some coders can be verbose, others just want to get the job done. You can write unreadable code in any language. This is fine for small projects because you can figure out what is going through trial and error. For Twitter it will not work. The bigger the teams the clearer and more defensive you have to code. Defensive code is verbose since you are checking for preconditions that might rarely occur. Some languages are more verbose than others.

But anyway no one codes bottom up. You usually start with a global design and iterate multiple times using mock ups if something is still vague. I don't think your question has an answer right now. Someone has to try it and see what the issues are.