The author said 3 different things in their comment. I was answering this:

"The point [..] isn't about disk savings as much as minimizing dependencies and surface area of attacks such as for glibc, bash, and OpenSSL in the past several years."

Technically they didn't say specifically how they would minimize surface area of attacks, so my assumption that they meant only by minimizing dependencies (seeing as their comment was followed by a list of dependencies) may have been faulty. Thanks for letting me know that in such a kind way.