Add a third thing: AI models. That's going to get more and more obnoxious over the next years.

I just did a "ncdu -x --exclude Volumes --exclude Users /" on my 15.5 (side rant: why the hell is the exclusion necessary to prevent ncdu going into an infinite recursion loop? -x should keep it on the same filesystem, no crossing mountpoints)... and well.

800 MB in printer drivers (/Library/Printers), 425 MB in audio loops (/Library/Audio/Apple Loops), probably 500 MB in various AI models in /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks (/MediaAnalysis.framework, /CoreSceneUnderstanding.framework, /CVNLP.framework, /TextRecognition.framework, /CoreHandwriting.framework), around 2 GB of other AI models in /System/Library/AssetsV2 (/com_apple_MobileAsset_LinguisticData, /com_apple_MobileAsset_UAF_Siri_Understanding, /com_apple_MobileAsset_Trial_Siri_SiriTextToSpeech), 800 MB in /System/Library/LinguisticData, a whopping 550 MB in fonts in /System/Library/Fonts (of which Apple Color Emoji.ttc alone consumes 180 MB of data?!).

So it's at least 2.5 GB of AI models alone. Crazy. I mean, props to Apple for offering local models that work without internet, that's far from a given these days (sad enough). But the lowest-spec MBA clocks in at 256 GB disk space... having to waste 1% on AI alone and more on all the other stuff? That's ridiculous.