Yes and no. In Ardour, which has a substantial dependency tree (80+ libraries), if we statically link, the edit/compile/debug cycle becomes incredibly bogged down by static linkage. It takes a long time (even with lld) to complete the link step. If we use shared libraries/dynamic linkage, the edit/compile/debug cycle is nice and fast, but application startup is a bit slower (not by as much as static linkage is slower, however).

For users, it would be better if the application was statically linked, at least in terms of startup cost. But because developers do the edit/compile/debug cycle much, much more often than users start the application, we opt for dynamic linkage.