I'm well aware. But keep in mind probably the majority of us were not writing software in the early 90s(no offense intended). We grew up in a world with Java, Python, and Perl...none of which weren't even capable of doing so. Sure C and C++ were around too, but of course not as 'hot', neither encouraged static linking, and as mentioned, sometimes weren't even capable of doing so depending on library.

The static libraries are only popular right now because people who don't need static cross-compiled binaries are convinced they need a computer that is exactly like the computer people who make websites need.

It's a very odd state of affairs. In an age of docker, nix uberjars, ever more sophisticated user and system space filesystems it's really questionable what value they bring.

People say, "Simplicity" then they bling out their docker containers with multiple layers of processes and initialization anyways.

Go's tooling would have been great in a pre-Docker era. Now... I don't see the appeal.

Well, keep in mind that Go also predates Docker by a bit. Docker really did solve the whole dependency issue of dynamic languages/runtimes, but Go still has a possible advantage here - it can be built in a much smaller container..even SCRATCH. A minor convenience at best, but something.