I did some digging about a year ago and the biggest uses of space are the docs and, surprisingly, fonts: https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/oqmb3w/installe

I did some digging about a year ago and the biggest uses of space are the docs and, surprisingly, fonts: https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/oqmb3w/installed_mactex_but_why_is_it_almost_5gb_in_size/h6dt4us/?context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/LaTeX/comments/oqmb3w/installed_mac... It’s mostly a death by a thousand cuts thing. MikTeX, which is available for Mac and Linux as well as Windows will do on-demand downloading of packages and is probably my recommendation for a new installation. A lot of the drawbacks to TeX stem from to trying to meet the combined requirements of computing platforms of the 1970s–1990s. All input files effectively live in a single namespace so you cannot have two input files with the same name (the same applies to coding where you have a single namespace for all your commands as well).