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Eric Miraglia has written a detailed post on YUI: Weighing in on Pageweights, that discusses the "file size" issue of JavaScript libraries:

When we opened up the YUI Library in February, we talked about some of our motivations for creating an entirely new JavaScript toolkit. One of those motivations, we said, was that Yahoo!’s diverse engineering communities demanded a solution that was lightweight, one that could be applied à la carte without unnecessary k-weight overhead.

With YUI now encompassing three CSS foundation libraries, six utilities and nearly a dozen UI controls, we thought it would be a good time for a progress report on library size, page weights, and YUI’s à la carte architecture. (Note: This article focuses almost exclusively on pageweight, which itself is only one element of overall performance. Filesizes described here are based on YUI’s 0.11.4 release.)

Eric measures the file size before and after compression and minification.

The graph tells the story on how the file size changes dramatically when munged with. As with some of the other frameworks, they also have an a la carte strategy so you can pick and choose the pieces of the library you need.

Do not download the kitchen sink, use one piece, and complain about the file size :)