(replying to myself)

Alpine package sizes:

- helix 10.3MiB (+ 3 dependencies: musl, libgcc, sh)

- emacs 14.5MiB (+ 1 dependency: musl)

- neovim 18.7MiB (+ 9 dependencies musl, lua, tree-sitter, libint, libluv, unibilium, utf8proc, libuv, libluajit))

So it doesn't seem out of the ordinary for popular cli editors, if you're worried about smaller environments.