A fun article from Microsoft

The shared libs approach was pioneered by SunOS / Solaris, which forbids static linking to this day. Linux copied many ideas from Solaris and this is one of them.

The best side effect of the shared libs mantra is that responibility is clear, it's up to the owner/maintainer of the problematic package to get the fix available in repos.

In a static approach a completely new dependency graph and process would be needed, the rust packaging in Fedora seems
to be step in this direction, where a more holistic approach is used.

For core services like sshd and httpd the dependency graph is not huge, however extending to popluar stacks like PHP and Python it gets very complex where fast, due to shared libs but also due to the use of "modules" the framework in question uses.

(Which was the reason for the Xubuntu breach lwn.net wrote about recently.)

Other related problem is the maintainship upstream, if upstream don't create proper releases and follows reasonable versioning scheme (like semver), how is downstream consumers supposed to able to use the software in a safe manner?

There are lots of hard problem to solve here, its far more complex than a simple fight between shared and static linking.