I had and still have the same issue a couple of months ago and made a comment in this similar post.
Also, you may need twice that size, the 1.7 GB space is after the agent is installed, in the install process you may need space for the tar.gz, for the unpacked tar.gz on a temporary path and the final installed path, so you may need something around 4 GB to be able to install it in some cases.
The agent is too bloated because since version 8.6 it includes everything it needs, so even if you just want to use metricbeat the installation will have everything the other integrations may use.
When I looked there was this issue about a lightweight Elastic Agent for containers and some discussion about the size change on this another issue.
But I don't think that there is any public issue tracking this, maybe is just something internally.