The Audit's Blind Spot: I Weighed the Build, Not the Page

I published a post called "I Audited My Own Portfolio and Found 20 Problems" . It was an inventory: I went through my own site — a React 19 + Vite SPA with Sanity as the CMS — wrote down everything that was wrong with it, fixed what mattered, and put the before and after numbers next to each item. If you haven't read it, the only part that matters here is the methodology, and one line of it in particular: I went through the build output chunk by chunk in build/assets/ . I called that the step that hurts and the one most people skip. I still think that is true. It is also the step that guaranteed I would miss the largest thing wrong with the site. The step that worked Weighing the build output worked exactly as advertised. Finding 1 of that audit was an unoptimized PNG of a developer illustration on /gabriel-abreu , my contact page, 993 KB, sent to every visitor who landed there. It went to 23 KB. A second image, the cutout of me that sits in three different greetings, went from 358 KB to 45 KB. Those two are bundled assets. A component imports one: import p from " ../assets/developer-illustration.webp " ; Vite follows that import, hashes the file, and emits it into build/assets/ . After the build it is a file on disk with a size. Listing the directory finds it. Sorting the listing by size finds it first. There is no way to ship it and not have it show up in that step. So the method was sound within its domain: both of those images are bundled assets, and the step found both. On August 23 I opened the blog index in a browser and watched what it actually requested. Sixteen post covers, 9.88 MB. None of that could have appeared in the audit. Not because I was sloppy that day — because of where those bytes come from. Two lifecycles A bundled asset exists at build time. An import makes it a build input, the bundler makes it a build output, and anything that reads the build output sees it. A CMS image is never a build input. Nothing imports it. It arrives as a string in a