@webnus in general it would be nice to optimize where possible so plugin assets do not create many requests or are too heavyweight which is currently the case.
I have not looked in detail, but For example it seems that FontAwesome is loaded even when the custom fonts option is turned off. Owl Carousel, Select2, Tooltip.js etc are not always required but seem to be loaded anyway. All CSS is probably crammed inside that beefy minified CSS file, but usually we need just a small subset of it in any given page.
So it isn’t a surprise that MEC impacts performance a lot and I think that in the current state of things this is a problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I like the features and the development that you’ve been putting into the plugin. However, today performance is as important as functionality so I recommend to your developer team to look how they can compartmentalize assets and load them intelligently. It is as important as adding features.
For example, if a library or icons are not needed, do not load them. Another thought, put the base CSS in one file and then create a CSS file for Grid styles, another for List styles etc. Removing unused libraries and serving less CSS will make things faster. And even if there are 2 requests for CSS files instead of 1, if the download is 5 times smaller then there is significant gain in performance.
I hope that this makes sense and that your team will be able to sort it out.
Thanks!