React tutorials shouldn't cover this. They're for learning React. Otherwise every tutorial for anything web based would need to include all the basics about the web too, every time.

I don't have an answer for where the best place to learn it in the course of becoming a dev. I learnt this stuff over 25 years ago when I was a teenager. The thing is, it was a necessity then. Now I can download a whole movie in less time than a poorly optimized webpage in the 90s. So while I still obsessively try to get the smallest best looking images when I'm doing frontend dev, I'm not sure it's really worth my time.

The author mentions automated tooling and I can see that being the best middle ground these days.

Do front-end devs really not know this sort of thing in 2025? I haven't done serious web development since the jQuery days and it's still second nature to me. (Granted, WebP barely existed at that point.) Honestly, when I was growing up this sort of thing was something ordinary users would know about.

> This is a SVG. Only 2KB!

That's the uncompressed size. Since most production webservers use compression, the actual transfered data according to Chrome's Inspector was .9kb. Ironically, the favicon.ico was a 32kb file that compressed to 4.3kb and was loaded when I looked at https://cdn.idiallo.com/images/assets/527/ping_svg.svg

It seems weird to blame React for this.

A bit of a nit, but the 17kb PNG actually looks slightly blurry, or "artifact-ed" on my MacBook screen. Happily though, the author included a section on SVG at the bottom, which was my knee-jerk reaction for the appropriate format for lettering at that scale.