Comment by tarentel

Can't speak for every app but I've worked on several through the years, a sizeable chunk of all the apps I've worked on were assets. It's possible to hide a lot of it from the app store size if you really wanted to but you'd end up downloading all the assets at some point anyway so there's really no point in putting the extra engineering effort in just to make your app store number look smaller.

This obviously isn't the case for every app and most of the ones I've worked on had a lot of bloat/crap in them as well.