I'm glad you noticed.

Check which linux-firmware-* packages you have installed. Arch recently split the linux firmware into a bunch of separate packages, and made the old package depend on pretty much all of them. So unless you already knew about this and uninstalled the packages you don't need, you likely have a bunch of unnecessary firmware stuffed into your fallback initramfs.

That’s mine.

Stock kernel (only custom loader entries), using systemd-boot. No LTS kernel installed. I assume for LTS this will more or less double.

Also, you can try switching to xz compression, it will reduce the image sizes by a decent amount

I think the initramfs has gotten a lot bigger over the last couple of years. More modules included, more functionality.

I had the same issue, breaking the update, and the solution was something along the lines of:

1. Edit /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
2. Change MODULES=most to MODULES=dep
3. Update initramfs:

   sudo update-initramfs -u
   

Although I think the cleanest way is to do it with an override config file in initramfs.conf.d, but do a bit of research on this.

I guess that by not including all modules, there is a risk the program forgets one of the modules you needed, but so far it works for me, and images are now a lot lighter.

coughRustcough