I tried using it once by compiling it from sources. Even a release build is several hundred megabytes in size, which I find pretty wasteful. After a little investigation I found, that it has many plugins in form of a shared library, and each of them has pretty huge size, presumably because the whole Rust standard library is statically linked.
My local build of helix is 20MB, did you use the suggested flags on the install guide page?
Interesting, although I checked and on NixOS the binary is just 29MB. It was statically linked, with just libc left as dynamic.
I think 29MB is still huge for a terminal text editor, but nevertheless not "hundreds".