Shrinking the kernel with a hammer

It is a feature for deployment, not so much for things one would expect from a distribution (i.e., development tools). One could do the same with C or C++ deployments, but it's a PITA to wrangle build systems in that stack without embedding dependencies, so "no one" does it. I suspect Rust (and not Go[1]) will get dynamic linking before C or C++ have viable "everything static" deployment solutions.

[1]AFAICT, Go has much more of a "non-Go code doesn't exist" mentality than Rust folks do for non-Rust code.