At least in pacman, you have to download the entire archive (because the packager's GPG signature goes over the full archive file), but you can set the NoExtract option e.g. to avoid the translations from being extracted: https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration/blob/master...
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.