The most accurate answer w/r to the thing you linked is: All binaries used to be much smaller, by a factor of 100x or more. And so on this aspect of performance

The most accurate answer w/r to the thing you linked is: All binaries used to be much smaller, by a factor of 100x or more. And so on this aspect of performance we have had a kind of regression where most things have a bigger footprint than necessary. Some of it is to be expected since 64-bit code is larger, and Unicode handling is larger, and we support more features even in the smallest CLI tools, but there's also an element of the tooling making an optimization that is locally sensible - expand code size to get some runtime performance benefits - and globally useless, since as the featuresets increase an increasing percentage of all code is "run once/run never" and not a hot loop, and so it's just wasting disk, memory and cache to have it in that configuration.