Hi Devin Schumacher,

The numerous JS/CSS files included in the Metronic demo are primarily for illustrative purposes. In a real-world application, you typically include only the files necessary for your specific use case. To enhance performance, you can remove the CSS/JS plugins that are not required.

For minifying the output of CSS/JS files, you can use Gulp with the --prod flag, as an example:

gulp --prod

Keenthemes wrote in the documentation that they did it that way on purpose. You can use webpack or gulp in the “tools” folder to delete the plugins etc that you don’t need in the respective config files and then recompile them.
And the code will be minified too. On gulp compile file:

if (args.prod !== false) {
 // force disable debug for production
 build.config.debug = false;
 // force assets minification for production
 build.config.compile.jsMinify = true;
 build.config.compile.cssMinify = true;
}