Framework Size Isn't About Runtime—It's About Packaging

The debate over why Svelte is smaller than React misses the real point: it's not whether a framework is compiled or runtime-based, but how it packages capabilities and generality. React's size stems from shipping a monolithic feature set regardless of what an application actually uses, not from the inherent cost of runtime models. If React's bundler and compiler could treat its feature set as a static graph, dead-code elimination could match the efficiency gains usually credited to compiled frameworks alone.