Apex Heap Size And Performance

So let's say I started working in an org that is massive Constants class that has over 500 public static variables. Anytime one of these variables is called in apex, every other variable in the class is initialized and is taking up memory in the heap size.

Is this necessarily a bad thing assuming that we aren't hitting heap size errors? Is the performance effected when all of these variables are initialized and sitting in memory for the whole transaction?