Yep, this is a problem that Flutter shares with Unity: It's BYO(everything) and not at all APK optimized. You use native, Android won't re-download libraries that are already on the device. Drops your APK size, increases your rankings.

FWIW, Apple doesn't care as much, and their users are used to it, so that's a plus I suppose.

Not the same but also related: Using RN and Ionic can just destroy battery life and CPU for apps because you are essentially running a full JS engine on top of all the native stuff. This can cause them to get aggressively killed when backgrounded and / or punished in other ways.

Debug builds are big. Production releases of Apps are very small - one of my Flutter Apps 7.6 MB.

Sure you checking the right build? Production builds are usually much smaller in size than debug builds. I had a complicated app that was only 20 MB in production, but like 300 MB in debug.