I understand that the packages are signed, but it should be possible to figure out what the user has on their system (eg, by hashes) and download only new (signed) objects in the package manifest. This is how ostree does it, for example (https://ostreedev.github.io/ostree/).
I don't understand why consuming this much bandwidth for such small changes is seen as acceptable. Bandwidth and disk space might be cheap in the developed world but it certainly isn't everywhere else.
They are the same managers and directors and investors and stakeholders and analysts and inter-team communicators and c-level whatever the heck they are. These people do not make decisions for the people that work for them. They just don’t. Xcode is a massive, barely functioning development environment that has a tremendous amount of incredibly talented and bright people working on it, who are purposefully told not to make things better for the sake of the time being pushed on other more important things.
Those important things are usually fixing small errors in high value enterprise relationships. Ew.
Sometimes it’s high visibility features To can be marketed to bring in a new generation of people writing software for their platform to bilk more fees from.
Under no circumstance should you ever operate under the assumption that the Apple Inc. group of owners legitimately are worried about the lack of engineering reasonability apply to their product.
This will be the way things work in the technology sphere of influence forever, until such time that the finances that are brought in from these products of development are not the only driving metric towards success or failure of a company or its role in society.