A fascinating look at Google Fonts from @stoyan shows the median size for variable (Latin-extended) web font on the service is 34744 bytes.
Hefty!
https://www.phpied.com/web-font-file-size-study-a-variable-font-addition/
@zachleat i had to look it up, it was Playfair Display and it had two variable woff2 format (for web?) files. Each 500KB!
The TTF were 1.4MB each
@r0b great multi-language support on that one! (read: subsetting needed )
@zachleat @r0b 1.4Mb TTF (source) becomes 278K after subset to latin only and turned to WOFF:
glyphhanger --subset="PlayfairRomanVF.ttf" --LATIN --formats=woff2
Though the subset didn't remove too many characters. Its LATIN supports 713 characters (down from 1603) which is very exhaustive. 3 times what the average Google font supports when subset to LATIN
I wonder if it's the "Optical size" axis that makes fonts bigger (as another comment suggested)