A Meme. The first half shows a screenshot of the game “Banana” on Steam, showing how it weighs 1.89 Gigabytes. The second half shows a couple of native americans talking on a snowy landscape while inspecting footprints on the snow.
Native A: A western game dev has been here. Native B: How can you tell? Native A: It weighs 1.89 Gigabytes.
Not making excuses for every instance but in the vast majority of cases, optimizations are done by making trades between runtime performance, RAM usage, and disk space. Of these, disk is cheapest. You might optimize something and end up using more disk space as a result.
For example not all video cards support compressed texture file formats (though gaming hardware is likely to be close to 100% now…) so you might store texture memory uncompressed on disk (bigger size) to save on the decompression needing to happen on the CPU before transfer to the GPU.
I mean sure, there are always concessions to be made, but what I had in mind was more the “include this entire 6 GB library so I can use this particular function once” kind of bloat.