Are you willing to give up 1080p screens and 16-bit/44.1kHz sampled music? Or how about languages that can't be represented in ASCII, much less Latin-1? Because handling those take up way more space than code.
I have. Still small compared to the images and such that are used in a user facing application.
Edit: just to bring in real numbers, I have an old TypeScript project that results in a 109M node_modules dir. Which I agree is absurd. I also have an old anime video, 21 minutes long, at only 560x432 resolution, 24fps, which takes 171M. And that's my point: even in really bad cases, code size tends to be swamped out by everything else in user-facing applications. If there's any kind of images, music, or video, the code size will be a small part of the complete picture.
As a point of comparison, in the last place I worked, the main project had over 600MB of javascript dependencies it pulled from node. Plus 300MB of python libraries for Django and whatever else.
At my current job, preparing your environment for development of one "isolated" php system will need at least 3GB of dependencies. Even the main programmer behind it has no clue how it happened or why.
I'd rather have the audio compressed and decompress in realtime instead of a game taking 100Gb in size. Or maybe give me the option to only download languages I can use.
You present a false dichotomy. Yes, things like uncompressed audio and HD video take up more storage space, but that does not negate that modern commercial software is very inefficient with how it uses resources. You could improve the efficiency of the system while keeping HD video, it is not a mutually exclusive choice.
For example, booting up Windows and doing nothing takes up 4gb of RAM, while doing the same with a lean Linux installation would take up a quarter of that, despite both operating systems having identical functionality (run web browser, open applications, edit documents, play games, etc).
Sure, and there are some performance gains to be made from it I'm sure, but when my OS is doing that and my web browser is doing that and my browser based chat client and my browser based text editor are all doing that, it gets pretty sluggish.
This is why Linux is a godsend for older machines, even running the exact same applications (Firefox, Discord, and vscode) on the exact same hardware, it still feels more responsive on Linux because there is less overhead from the OS itself.