Genuine question. I’m assuming that, since YouTube is owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world that they’ve optimized their delivered JS to only what is necessary to run the page.

What on the YouTube home page could possibly require 12MB of JS alone? Assuming 60 characters per line, that’s 200k lines of code? Obviously ballpark and LoC != complexity, but that seems absurd to me.

Meanwhile, loading up a channel page with Invidious pulls in about 700k and half of that is the banner. JavaScript was not mandatory (on public instances) but it is now due to AI scrapers.