Android required this at one point for different resolutions. I'd be surprised if the svg proccessing used more time and battery (not to mention space) than loading uncompressed images from disk.
> Which then begs the question, "I only need the English version. Why am I forced to download a dozen other languages I'll never read or even knew existed?"
I guess that's down to the limitations of various app stores/package managers. All the windows deployment options are awful enough that that I'd bundle everything too. I'm not aware of app stores that allow dependencies or optional packages. Billions of dollars flow through these stores but they're still more limited than apt.
Packages managers (apt, chocolaty, etc) can do it but would still need a few tweaks to do it well.
Because packagers don't have the patience to split them up. LibreOffice on Debian & derivatives, for example, has a different package for each localization plus a different package for the Help files in each language.
I some someone do a similar thing about how bloated vim had become but it was mostly documentation (plus translations) and stuff like that, not vim itself.
Which then begs the question, "I only need the English version. Why am I forced to download a dozen other languages I'll never read or even knew existed?"
That also reminds me of a few programs I've come across that inexplicably let you dynamically change their UI language to one of around a dozen choices (and all the language names were in English too...) If I remember correctly, it was something simple like a file converter or downloader where most of the UI was icons anyway, and around 90% of the installer package's size was these resource files. Just... why.