LaTeX is from the 80s. I understand it has grown over time, but to >1GB? That's huge, even for modern standards, for just a typesetting program. The documentation is a dependency that seems to be forced on you (it's not an optional dependency in Debian), and fonts are also big. But even without that, you're left with about 600MB if I recall correctly which is still huge for just formatting text right?
But it's not "just" a typesetting program. The TeXlive installation includes a huge amount of packages, supporting all kinds of typesetting, including maths, music sheets, pictures (TikZ), support for making posters, presentations, various little enhancements like microtype etc. etc.
I am quite happy to dedicate 1GB to that. Especially in a world, where random websites tend to dump 3-4MB on me (with liberal use of adblockers) to render a few paragraphs of text.
LaTeX is from the 80s. I understand it has grown over time, but to >1GB? That's huge, even for modern standards, for just a typesetting program. The documentation is a dependency that seems to be forced on you (it's not an optional dependency in Debian), and fonts are also big. But even without that, you're left with about 600MB if I recall correctly which is still huge for just formatting text right?