Packages like NumPy and SciPy are working to reduce their wheel size, significantly decreasing egress traffic for pypi.

For skimage, the two most obvious routes to do that are:

• Remove remaining data files, which would then be pulled in via pooch only
• Split package into two parts, core + tests (see BLD: use install-tags to optionally install tests numpy/numpy#26274)

xref: meta-issue numpy/numpy#25737