A few weeks back I went down a rabbit hole: I pulled up twelve random open-source frontend repos (mostly dashboards and SaaS landing pages) and looked at exactly how each one was shipping its icons. Not the design — the delivery mechanism. Inline SVG? Icon font? Sprite sheet? Base64?
What I found was almost depressingly consistent. Nine out of twelve repos had some version of the same problem, and it wasn't the one most performance checklists warn you about.
The usual suspects everyone already knows about
Most devs have internalized these by now:
Icon fonts (Font Awesome-style) pulling in a 200KB font file for 40 glyphs actually used
