Steven Zahm@ Susan
re: Most of the plugins we use only call scrips and styles where required – is it possible to have Connections do the same?
Other than de-enqueuing them and then re-enqueueing them, sorry, no. I did have this at one time but quickly removed it because many users use the shortcode in places that can not be checked for in the post/page content (which is how other plugins do it). So examples. In text widgets and a few visual page builder plugins/themes that are popular enough that they can not be ignored.
The extra files have no impact beyond the first page load by a visitor anyway because the browser will cache the files and use them on subsequent page visits by the user. You probably better off from a performance standpoint to use a caching plugin like WP Rocket which minifies (Connections scripts are already minified) and concatenates CSS/JavaScript files.
Hope that answers your question thoroughly.