Sorry about the overly dramatic title.
Currently, I'm working on a website on my local setup using Local WP. I built a page using Elementor and when I exported the database, it was about 1.5MB in size. I opened the SQL file with VSCode and noticed that the insert statements made against the postmeta table had around 629k characters in total.
Later, I added some responsiveness. Because the page had quite a few absolutely positioned elements, I had to tweak many things to make it work in both tablet and mobile viewports. It involved the usual reductions of paddings, margins, font sizes and repositioning of elements in each container. I then exported the database again and this time it was upwards of 5MB. The insert statements made against the postmeta table now had around 3.4 million characters.
This doesn't feel like a normal progression. Could I be doing something wrong?