The code bloat is just an issue for first timers maybe, use svgmin before inlining, and it would reduce the file size significantly. I used it at my projects, 15 SVG icons - 9KB to < 2KB. Then inlined them, now can change fill on hover and lot more. Inlining saves a lot of request overhead. Worried about repetition, the gzip compression takes care of all that.
SVG are awesome, but only if you are careful.
Joey Kudish
Founder & Lead Developer at Spark Consulting
The code bloat issue seems like a non-issue to me, as long as you use some kind of build step that inlines those svgs for you at build/deploy time rather than doing it manually for each SVG.
I use react-svg-inline combined with webpack to accomplish this.