The real conspiracy is that a big game requires you to delete or limit the number of competitors games. Not only is yhere no incentive to be smaller, there is actually a strategic incentive to be bigger.
It doesn’t actually need 130gb of updates, that’s the fun part. They probably only made a couple gigabytes of changes at most, just their shitty folder/packing structure requires downloading every single ‘unit’ of the game again because they made minor changes
On the hand hosting and bandwidth cost have come down significantly to the point where the price per gigabyte is in the 0.0 cent region.
On the other hand, developers are incredibly expensive, especially when they could do something that results in even more value for the company.
At the end of the day, downloading the full file is a reliable and all in all cheap way of providing an update, even if it's annoying and frustrating as hell to download 138GB just because one bit was flipped.
Ark is total madness. Every map has a copy of every dinosaur. Not just the dinos for that map, but all dinos in the game. That's because you can transfer dinos, so somebody may transfer a dino to your map from a mao that you don't have the DLC for. And you still need to be able to see and interact with that dino.
They probably tried and failed. IIRC the original Ark was build on a pre-release version of Unreal engine 4. There were probably loads of things missing or broken in that engine. When they couldn't make UE load assets from a shared storage location, it was probably just easier to ship all dinos with every map.
