A lot of geography-specific scenarios are compiled into the app, including regional payment SDKs. There's a great comment from a former Uber engineer explaining it here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25376346

If I was going to guess, I'd get there's a ton of third party code for things like payment method SDKs. Every local payment method around the world is going to have its own package that you need to import, and you can't just load in new executable code on the fly after the app is installed.

I think they using vector graphics and vector animations (say Rive). Rive takes order of 10s of KBs. Lottie is much larger to 100s of KBs. Even then you would need 5000 animations to reach 500MB, unlikely!

raster graphics and videos are likely not included in build

probably some unused code (libraries) got into it, it can grow quite large

or maybe some ML models?