I was not totally happy with the frontend performance of dabdab and decided to spend an evening looking into it. Some of the changes:
The timeline package that I use is a real waste as well, it takes a whole bunch of dependencies with it that are worth of hunderds of kilobytes. The other offender is uikit framework, since many of the components that should be purely css like a grid for example, require js for no apparent reason.
From js side one potential fix is to use bundle chunking and load all the js only on the pages that need them. For example, symfony supports it, rails supports it too