OK, so the first thing we need to be clear about is it the actual download install file or the size of the installed folder on ones hard drive.
If its the download, Blender 3.2.1 for Windows is currently 213MB, so even at 30% more it would be around 277MB. Granted that’s a bit more, but in the total scheme of the Internet now days, it really isn’t all that much and I speak as someone with a 100GB monthly data limit.
I think that’s really blowing things somewhat out of proportion. We are talking the Cycles core, there’s a good chance it doesn’t even load in at start-up and if you then only use Eevee it may not load at all. So load time and RAM usage is still way way low.
Basic SATA SSD’s are dirt cheap now days for 512GB or less, the CPU/RAM/Motherboard/PSU/GPU and very likely even the case will all individually cost more, so at this stage we just don’t even have a PC, so running Blender is a moot point.
Also, lets look at the irony about all this. On one hand we have some threads and various posts about how people want Cycles to render at ‘better quality’ and here we are talking about an addition to Cycles that will do just that but it’s all too hard because it may make Blender use a little more disk space or a few MB’s more RAM… guess they should stop all work on Geometry Nodes (can’t add any more nodes) or Texture Painting or Sculpting, surely that’s going to make Blender load slower…