You could, since it’s a runtime dep. But a better comparison would be to the client dev tool chains in other ecosystems, like Xcode (11GB), though still not very interesting. Turns out client dev is hard and it doesn’t make much sense hand wringing over dev tool size metrics.

Better to look at how well they solve their problem space.

No because they are not counting the size of the browser or nodejs

you could and it would still be much smaller.

Java HelloWorld runs in 1mb:

  20:18:01 /tmp > echo 'public class HelloWorld {public static void main(String[] args) {System.out.println("Hello World!");}}' > HelloWorld.java
  20:18:09 /tmp > javac HelloWorld.java
  20:18:14 /tmp > java -Xmx1m HelloWorld
  Hello World!