Isn’t this especially true in the world of containerization? We literally ship entire images or configurations of OS’s to run a single application or system function.

Although, I have mixed feeling about containers, because I fully appreciate that Unix is the application and the software that runs on it are just the calculations. In that world, sure, a shared library makes sense the same way a standard library makes sense for a programming language. Thus, a container is “just” a packaged application.

Regardless, this concept is so out of the realm of “performance” that it’s worth noting that the idea of trying to reduce memory use or hard disk space is not a valid argument for shared libraries.