I have a friend with a very slow internet connection (~8Mbps aka 1MB/s) and it takes him at best to load the workshop model selector in 30 seconds to even over a minute. I’ve checked my internet usage when loading the workshop selector using Task Manager and found out that it was using ~150Mbps (just under 20MB/s) to load just the icons and other workshop data, not even the models themselves.
What i think could be a possible fix is to load the workshop data into memory and only free it once leaving a server (or never, its 20MB anyway), this way, those with slow connections would only have to wait about a minute for the first time loading the selector, rather than waiting that long every time they want to change playermodel or apply a workshop item.
Or perhaps have the default icon generated with the workshop editor be saved as .jpg (or equivalent), you don’t need that much detail for an icon anyway and this could save a couple MB of data being loaded in.