Yep, but that only takes you into the range of 100s of KBs. To get above 1 MB is possible, but at some point before you hit a 5 MB initial page load it becomes the fault of things other than the technology you're using.

EDIT: For reference, https://www.tmz.com/ with no ad blocker is 19.22 MB (7.51 compressed) and takes 19.99 seconds to load, and they only use jQuery. I don't think the underlying technology is the problem for them.