The huge-looking sizes are not representative of actual size on disk. On first installation of one app of a kind, their runtime packages get installed as well. For example, installing GNOME apps will install the latest GNOME runtime. But after that, installing any other GNOME app takes little to no space.
In your case, you don’t seem to have any apps installed as Flatpaks, which means even the freedesktop runtimes are missing and need to be installed. That’s probably why it looks so huge.
Why are they so god-damn big? Let’s look at a few pieces of software on Linux Mint
Stellarium: Real-time photo-realistic sky generator
Blender: Very fast and versatile 3D modeller/renderer
VLC: VLC media player, the open-source multimedia player
I ran “apt remove vlc --purge && apt autoremove && apt install vlc” to double check, because that seemed insane.
The huge-looking sizes are not representative of actual size on disk. On first installation of one app of a kind, their runtime packages get installed as well. For example, installing GNOME apps will install the latest GNOME runtime. But after that, installing any other GNOME app takes little to no space.
In your case, you don’t seem to have any apps installed as Flatpaks, which means even the freedesktop runtimes are missing and need to be installed. That’s probably why it looks so huge.