OK, thanks for clarifying.
The page itself is 110K. Most of that is project-specific markup. Your
choice whether to use less markup there. Around 20K or so might be due
to Apostrophe.
Of the remainder, 1MB consists of project-specific images. Again...
your choice. For these we used the "full" option with the
apostrophe-images widget, we could have used "half" to send much
smaller images, and for this particular page layout perhaps we should
have. But it's not a limitation of Apostrophe, just something the
developer has a choice about.
There's 151K of CSS; how much of that is Apostrophe responsible for?
jQuery UI: 25K. We should look at whether we really need to send this
to logged out users. Probably not.
pikaday: 4K. Same.
fontawesome 4: this is worth it for most projects!
The rest: mostly project-specific. Your choice as developer.
As for JavaScript, we pull in lodash, jquery, async and some much
smaller things.
But all of Apostrophe's asset overhead likely comes to less than one
image on the page. What you're mostly seeing here is some bulk in the
project-specific stuff.