TeX distributions are enormous, but the binaries themselves are actually not big—the overhead imposed by Knuth’s obnoxious license, while nonzero (you can’t modify the original Pascal-in-WEB source, only patch it, so a manual source port to a different language is painful enough that nobody tried, we’re all using an automatic Pascal-to-C translation with lipstick on it), is not huge, and aside from a smattering of utilities that’s it for the binary part.

It’s just that the distros also include oodles of (plain text!) macro packages for everything under the sun. There are some legitimately large things such as fonts, but generally speaking a full TeXLive or MiKTeX distribution is bloat by ten thousand 100-kilobyte files, like a Python distribution with the whole of PyPI included.

If you know what you want, you can probably fit a comprehensive LaTeX workbench in under 50M, but it takes an inordinate amount of time.