[mickmcq]

My impression is that TinyTeX downloads required packages on the fly and can be quite tiny if you don’t use many packages.

[bmacho]

Well here in the project readme there is a table with the sizes: https://github.com/rstudio/tinytex-releases (a bit outdated, they didn't refresh it). I downloaded TinyTex-1 for Windows, it's 338 MB uncompressed. It is _huge_ in my book.