This is technically true, but it's a difference of a 5 MB executable vs a 50 MB.

Is it, actually? I mean, yes of course its 45MB difference, but does this matter? We are not talking about applications downloaded to a browser (webapp) or to a mobile phone. In a time where I download >50GB+ games on Steam and deploy from CI/CD server or docker registries to my servers, is a size of 50MB or 100MB really a showstopper?

Don't get me wrong, I totally love 4k and 64k demos and am always fascinated what could be packed into such small binaries, but in my professional life I think developer productivity, code quality and tooling is way more important than filesize. This is of course different if you are a webdev that ships .js, or an App developer publishing to Appstores.

The only environments where self-contained deployment matters are the ones you mentioned: browser, mobile phone, and also desktop. So yes, 45mb is a big difference (actually my app is 250mb).

In the .NET context, browser-targeted deployments can have a minimal download overhead of around 2 MB, which is a far cry from 50 MB. How? Blazor. For details, see https://blog.ndepend.com/blazor-internals-you-need-to-know.

That's 2Mb front-end which is quite heavy.

How 2 MB could be considered heavy, when visiting most websites results in much larger sizes of downloaded resources?

tell that to websites auto-playing videos (in muted state) or even better, using videos as page background that play without interop.

.NET has trimming now, so it is 5 MB? (Possibly less!)

Nope.

Running this command:

    dotnet publish `
    -p:Configuration=Release `
    -p:PublishSingleFile=true `
    -p:PublishTrimmed=true `
    -p:RuntimeIdentifier=win-x64

gives an 11 MB file, that still requires 4 DLL as well.