James Coombs is a design engineer who maintains the icon package a frontend org installs across roughly twenty apps. Its largest icon set alone is 7,798 generated React components, and the whole design of the build exists so that importing one of them pulls in exactly one file.
That 7,798 is the small version (counted 2026-08-19; regenerate with ls src/material/rounded-400/*.tsx | wc -l, because this number grows most weeks and a count frozen in prose is the failure this piece's sibling article is about). It's one icon style at one weight, both fill states: about 3,900 icons times two. The config that generates them can multiply that across every weight, optical size, and grade Google's Material Symbols publish (optical size and grade being the axes that tune an icon for small displays and for contrast), into the tens of thousands. So the first design question was never how to generate them. It was how to keep a consumer who imports one icon from paying for the other 7,797.
This isn't a tour of how bundlers eliminate unused code. It's about the two decisions that make their job trivial instead of contingent, and the one that will ship you a package that runs and won't type-check.
The barrel, and why it's a build-time problem, not a bundle one
