is the bloating a problem to the player? Or does it just ignore the end of the file but manage to cope?

Yes, it's a problem to the player because the player only reads modulo-4096 bytes. If your config.ini grows to over 4096 bytes, it will forget all of the settings before byte 4096. I updated the FAQ entry on config.ini editing a couple of days ago to include this information.
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Tony Fabris