Well, I have to admit, it is smaller than a docker container of alpine Linux containing the ls binary! Still doesn't mean it's monstrously large for no good reason.

Why would I want to compare apples to oranges? Though admittedly in this crazy day and age someone has probably already reimplemented coreutils in node.js just because.

I have seen my fair share of javascript-based console applications. My guess is that the author tries to assure us that exa is no such thing but behaves reasonably for a console application (not gigantic, not incredibly slow) and makes his statements in that light.