Quick answer: Godot 4 release export ballooning past 200MB because of debug symbols? Use the templates from the release archive, not the debug one - or strip with objcopy --only-keep-debug.

Itch.io upload rejects the build at 220MB. The Linux binary alone is 180MB; should be 60MB.

Reinstall release templates

Editor Settings > Export Templates > Install. Pull from the official release archive, not debug. The release templates ship without DWARF symbols.

Strip post-export

objcopy --only-keep-debug game game.debug
strip game

Useful when you want to ship both: a stripped binary for distribution and an out-of-band symbol file for symbolicating crash dumps.

Verify export preset

On the preset, ensure Export With Debug is unchecked. The button is easy to enable by accident and bypasses your stripped template.

“Debug symbols are 90% of your binary size - and 0% of what end users need.”

Keep the unstripped binary in your crash-dump pipeline. When a player sends in a report, you'll want the symbols available locally to resolve frames.