@xangold all the SVGs were exported from Adobe Illustrator and never had the fat trimmed by SVGO, or similar tool. Here’s an example of the GMod badge done by hand www.mergely.com/zZPdF4ta/ as SVGO throws an error while trying to optimize it. Gzipped it’s 516 bytes (original is 1,587 bytes).
Though I reported 20% savings when I posted last night, using SVGO saves more than 50% on each badge (aside from GMod, of course). You can quickly see these results using this online SVGO tool https://jakearchibald.github.io/svgomg/
e: here’s a good resource explaining the exact issue https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-content-efficiency/image-optimization#optimizing-vector-images