I really don’t think that’s a lot either. Nowadays we routinely process terabytes of data.
I think portability and easy parsing is the only advantage od CSV. It’s definitely good enough (maybe even the best) for small datasets but if you have a lot of data you need a compressed binary format, something like parquet.
Is 600 MB a lot for pandas? Of course, CSV isn’t really optimal but I would’ve sworn pandas happily works with gigabytes of data.
It’s funny because where I live there were even warnings to never give your card to the cashier back when they weren’t so popular. It was precisely because of some rare cases of cashiers managing to clone or charge the card during that moment. I, and most people I know, wouldn’t just hand in their card if asked. It just doesn’t happen here.