Question About Mesboot

For some backstory, I’ve been trying to get Guix setup on an old Thinkpad 545 with sway, but keep getting errors about it not being able to setup the backend. I’ve compared my config with loraz/guixos-sway and the SSS project, and couldn’t find any meaningful discrepancies (basically the only thing I didn’t try was greetd; seatd wouldn’t setup XDG_RUNTIME_DIR but elogind would). So, as a last ditch, I figured I’d try just using loraz/guixos-sway directly (changing the hardware config, obviously). It ended up being too big for my root partition so I removed the extra channel and all the browser and media packages (I have a tangential question about this at the end), ran guix gc, then tried reconfiguring again with the no substitutes flag (kept getting weird TLS errors that never happened before the gc).

From the time I first installed guix until now, I have never had an install, guix pull, or system reconfigure take longer than 6 hours, but it has been almost 30 hours and it’s still building, with almost all of that time dedicated to various mesboot packages. So I guess my question is, is mesboot generally included prebuilt in the install image, but got gc’ed? Or is there something about the loraz/guixos-sway config that prompted this build that I didn’t notice? And most importantly, how can I avoid ever having to rebuild it again as I genuinely would have preferred doing a fresh install at this point but I feel like I’m in too deep to cut it off now lol (and now I’m afraid to run guix gc again, despite it being necessary before to clear the 30gb from the browser and media packages).

TANGENT: are the browser and media packages in loraz/guixos-sway (config/home/services/sway-desktop.scm) seriously over 30gb?? Or is the extra channel he added on somehow ballooning the disk usage? I’m new to linux overall so I’m not well versed on much of this stuff, but over 30gb for a couple browsers feels absurd when the entire rest of the system only took up a couple gigs. Would really suck to have to repartition my root just to use qutebrowser, for instance. Hopefully I’m just missing something here though.

Thanks in advance for any insight!