I just saw your edit. You have WAY more stuff under your home directory than I do. I only have ~2.5M inodes on both my laptop drives combined. The difference in the buff/cache output of `free` before and after running `dut` is only 1 GB for me.
Yeah I have a TB of bazel outputs in my cache directory. Unfortunately automatically deleting old bazel outputs is beyond the frontier of computer science and has been pushed out to future releases for 6 years and still going: https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/issues/5139
Also, TIL about that kernel parameter, thanks!