I agree that the page sizes of the theme website are much too big, especially if there’s a decent amount of mobile visitors coming.
But it might also be Netlify, which isn’t a very fast website host (even when the cache is warm).
I just hope that the majority of Hugo’s target audience lives in the US, because the page speed from other regions is quite poor (even on desktop).
For example:
theme website from California, 1.09s load time:
theme website from Australia, 7.96s load time:
And:
documentation page from California, 485ms load time:
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bFQOfb/https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/#emojis
Same documentation page from Australia, 2.76s load time:
https://tools.pingdom.com/#!/bHEQz0/https://gohugo.io/content-management/formats/#emojis