musl lets you have statically linked C nice and easy. (glibc can't really be made static). It produces executables that can fit on a floppy disc even for large stuff. Alpine has a statically linked ffmpeg, though it can be difficult to compile occasionally.

Bandwidth can be cheap, depending on where you are, but giant applications just sort of smell of "get it working now" instead of "make sure it will give the user a good experience".