You might be surprised how much disk space those GNOME Circle applications actually require, despite being dynamically linked to a lot of GTK/GNOME libraries. Unless they’re written in a scripting language, they’re much closer to a COSMIC application than you think.
I don’t see the issue with an application having a static binary within the realm of 15-25 MB. Even if you had 100 applications installed, that’s only 2 GB of disk usage.