My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek but there's some truth to it. Since the receiver creates a navigable data structure with 64-bit pointers, every two bytes

My comment was mostly tongue-in-cheek but there's some truth to it. Since the receiver creates a navigable data structure with 64-bit pointers, every two bytes sent ("[]") becomes 20+ bytes in RAM (low estimate!). An order of magnitude magnification helps.