That reminds me of .kkrieger, a 96KB FPS developed by the demoscene group Farbrausch which was aggressively subsetted in the same fashion at the very last minute [1]. This approach worked very well... until it didn't. It is interesting to see the history repeating itself---with the same caveat!

[1] https://fgiesen.wordpress.com/2012/04/08/metaprogramming-for...