I should also mention that that 35 kB is uncompressed—gzipped, it’s 13 kB, and with brotli it’s 11.3 kB.

Meanwhile, an empty React project seems to be up to 190 kB now, 61 kB gzipped.

For startup performance, it’s fairly well understood that image bytes are cheap while JavaScript bytes are expensive. WebAssembly bytes cost similar to images.