[0] I know this, because it's a complete pain to use class files which have been stripped of debug data. Suddenly autocompletes look like "someFunction(String arg0, Thing arg1)" with no other supporting information.
EDIT: Just took a look, the indexes for a few workspaces I have are all under 50MB.
JavaScript projects tend to have more dependencies, but those tend to be smaller and will have a smaller index.
Solving this 'problem' would lose Kite money, so I don't fault them for not attempting it.
I think it really boils down to: what happens when their servers are compromised; how much liability will Kite assume for the lost IP? My guess is: None.
They don't even have a discoverable privacy policy, just a blog post! Going into the purchase pipeline, there's no service contract, just a "sign up for an account and give us your CC".
So, given that these indices could be obtained as needed, I'm not sure I buy this argument anymore.
If we can justify the download of a 20mb for a set of plugins, I think that we can justify a 2mb download to document the entirety of a language's standard library.
As a few points of comparison, Atom's download is around 80MB, Docker 110MB, PyCharm is around 175mb, and a ctags file that covers over 8,000 source files (including boto2/3, aws-sdk-go, the python standard library (both 2.7 and 3.5), the go standard library) is about 6 MB compressed.