Ah, shower water! I did some experimenting with that a while ago. Water is one of the most difficult things to create. One reason is that water is almost always moving. That's difficult to represent in a static image.
I had to laugh at your 2.18GB object. Been there, done it, got the T-shirt
But I have some experience with down-sizing objects because in most of my large projects that is essential.There are some tricks you can use. As you can see the left example is 2 objects of only 163kB, the center 2 objects of 191kB, and the right is 2 objects of 560kB.
Now how these were created. Your choice of balls was a very bad choice considering the object size of a sphere. I didn't even try that.
The left two examples are both simple cylinders. One long cylinder per water line. That certainly limits the number of objects needed to get a rain shower idea. But of course those are not real water drops although shower water tends to be more of a stretched water line than a series of drops.
Taking that idea I tried the same but with little pieces of different lenght of cylinders and organizing them like you did the stretches of balls. That was still too big for me, I think one set of lines was a little over 3000kB.
So how is the right object constructed? Boxes. Yes, plain simple boxes 0.5 cm square and with 3 different lenghts stacked and those multiplied to get a long line. The circles were created as 80cmx80cm but the imported end-result was reduced to 35cmx35cm to give a denser result and thinner water lines. Another trick to reduce size is to make unnecessary faces invisible before export. I made the top and bottom invisible and that worked out great!
The right example shown uses a texture instead of a color. I created the texture by processing a screenshot exactly like you proces the photos for the photo-boxes you created. There's not that much difference in size if you use a color or a texture.
Some processing is needed to get the end result. First I changed all material names of the boxes to Water. Then I ran the object through Blender to group the many g groups into a single object group. At that time I also smoothed everything. After export from Blender I edited the mtl file to set a transparency of d0.4. The smooting makes the boxes look like cylinders. The result is shown in the image.
These were experiments. To create a final 'perfect' object you shouldn't need two objects to display what is in the images. A single object with twice as much waterlines still ends up with the same size as two of the shown objetcs. Then more experimenting with colors, tranparency, and shininess. Maybe a different texture because the one I created is a little too dark.
Objects size is probably less of a problem for you so you might try my boxes experiment with cylinders and maybe a greater differentiation in lenghts you use. I simply turned every second line up-side-down to avoid horizontal gaps but a greater variation would be better. Do make the top and bottom invisible because that enhances the water effect: you can see through the top/bottom as if the inside is not there and it will show the next water lines. The added benefit is less faces to render.
(The woman is a free model, Misaki, from cgtrader.com.)
Edit: I just had weird thought: what would it look like if the inside of the cylinders was made a mirror? Sigh, so much to do, so little time...
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