So you did write code and played with game engine and you have no idea how game can get big and you don't know how it can be optimized to be smaller? Right. Now I just think you are trolling. You know what you should do? Go to your phone's camera and configure for files to be saved in RAW or BMP. While you are at it convert all your songs to WAV. See how fast your drive space goes. When instead of saving 2-5MB JPEG images you start having 40MB per image. Free space goes away pretty fast.

Archives don't need to be compressed, but when they are... it's optimizing for lower space usage. That's what optimization is... sacrificing one resource for another, in this case loading/cpu time for storage size. Am also not sure how you assumed it's not compression at fault here. You are telling me basketball game has terabytes worth of compressed assets? Fat chance of that even if you take into account all the shenanigans they do these days by adding slot machines and day one DLCs.

And yes, not only game, but all developers have become lazier. Me being one and coming into contact daily with other people's code I can tell you this has changed over the years. People will import 45MB big SDK so they don't have to write a single POST request. Use AI to write a function because they couldn't be bothered to look up documentation. Just look at popularity of Electron. Bundle entire web browser so they can avoid learning native libraries of writing code in some other language. You also seem to think I said developers are lazy bums, which is not true. They did get lazier considering hardware is relatively cheap these days most won't bother with using the least amount of resources because they don't have to. This being a talk about game, it's probably a combination of multiple factors.

You should really look into 64k intro scene and see what people can achieve with just 64kb of executable size. It is an example in opposite direction where people compete in cramming as much as possible in 64kb and optimizing it to all hell, but it goes to show it can be done. Look at Clean Slate from 2021 competition. Or on a different tangent, look at KolibriOS, entire operating system with minimum boot option being single floppy, 1.44MB or entire collection of applications at 40MB, including browser, games, word processor, compiler, debugger, file manager, drivers for all kinds of hardware, etc. It's possible... takes time but it's possible.