I see, at the first time it sounded more like questioning the project's reason to exist...

E.g. Chromium, Firefox, clang, including debug symbols will be quite sizable - Chromium sometimes trips me up when I somehow (usually accidentally) enable the debug config, and the only thing I see is the linker complaining that my 32-bit Arm target will be unhappy with the 6GB+ executable... I imagine some people do this intentionally, hacking on these projects directly.

English is not my native language, and us Norwegians are known to be direct.

Anyway, now that you mention it I do recall the C++ project I worked on way back started to crash the linker due to running out of address space. Had to switch to the 64bit version.

Though didn't recompile often, it was slow enough that I reread my code several times before compiling, even in debug mode.