I've definitely experienced the opposite, where indexes run rampant and are NN times the size of data (for the entire database!)

That being said also "required indexes ahead of time" is impossible - because query patterns change and things get released unless you mean something like "the required indexes for our obvious query patterns we just freaking released.

I dont think most columns need to be indexed because that is mostly nonsense, most columns never have a where clause applied to them or are sorted on themselves, so an index provides ??? value.