you are correct that it generates code (boilerplate) you don't need. I should check this. However, I probably wont care as 5 years ago the local machine was shipping with 64 GB. What is a small Linux node on any of clouds. Last time I checked cloud vendors were not (directly) charging for the size of your program footprint. More significantly , (why i have not checked), packagers and docker container overhead should be a magnitude, at least, more than un used boilerplate from @dataclass. unless you have 10,000-100,000 clasess!