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Performance,startup time and memory usage matter more in terminal apps than almost anywhere else.That's why people react strongly to this.

Why does the on-disk size matter for any of that?

More code to load from disk to memory, and while it may be fast, it’s not instantaneous.

SSDs can read at gigabytes per second, and only the used portions are paged into memory.

Anything else?

Loading a program in memory is much more complicated than raw disk transfer speed.

So you’re saying that if you append 1GB of junk data to the end of an executable it would be slower to execute?

No? So it’s not purely a function of disk size.

Because it will load into RAM. And RAM cost money. Also, quite hard to upgrade on the laptop

The entire executable isn’t loaded into RAM.

And are laptops a primary deployment target?