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They are most likely referring to the overall size of the whole website including all generated HTML for posts, static content, styles etc.

1gb is huge even for a whole website. Unless there are videos or hundred of high definition photos. Curious to know what makes up this space.

Maybe they included node_modules in that count.

It is a 991MB website, before optimisations.

The large majority of this comes from large header images for the Insights post content: https://www.magiclasso.co/insights/

These are png images that are relatively large in size until optimisation creates smaller, multiple image set versions.

I wouldn't say that this is an unusually large site. Any site with a medium amount of content would likely grow to such a size.

I guess mostly picture. If you have 500 posts, one picture for each, and then optimize image for responsive and browser compatibility, there should be 3 to 12 images per image source set:

Mobile, Tablet, Desktop as breakpoints / AVIF with webp or jpeg fallback, Retina/Normal.

And this will increase the overall-size to 12 x 500 x 50kB = 300MB

I doubt there's a practical reason for an average website, especially something blog-like to have pre-optimized pictures for that many screen types.