The Compact C Type Format in the GNU toolchain

There is! objcopy. Most sections of the binary that add bytes to it cannot be stripped via an explicit strip option because doing so would inevitably break things. Do you really *want* an explicit option to strip out .text.cold?! (Sure, .ctf is not remotely comparable to part of the text section: but if it does start to get used for e.g. plugin interoperation, it woudl probably become comparable to .dynsym. You don't usually want to strip that out, either.)

In my experience, binary growth is both inevitable and routine: it even happens when constant effort is imposed to prevent it: the most you can do is slow it down, unless you want to eschew all new features forever. Even busybox grows slowly over time. Even that paragon of the optimizer's art, Elite, grew until it could no longer have known bugs fixed because fixing them would take a few bytes that just weren't there any more. Everything grows.

(Note that the .ctf section is *not* a loaded section. So it won't slow down program startup, make it use more memory or address space, or anything like that. It's loaded as needed by the things that use it.)