> Utilities used for system administration (and other root-only commands) are stored in /sbin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/local/sbin. /sbin contains binaries essential for booting, restoring, recovering, and/or repairing the system in addition to the binaries in /bin.

https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/index.html

You may be thinking of the /bin and /usr/bin difference, though.

But I have only ever seen historic references to that argument, from back when dynamic linking was scary and unreliable. I certainly have never encountered that situation in almost 25 years of using Linux.

My memory is hazy but I recall the distinction being / vs /usr not /bin vs /sbin.

Having mnt be statically linked makes it much easier to recover that system.

The ideal of "/sbin for system tooling" isn't so much one of static vs dynamic but rather users accidentally finding system tools that don't work and sending email to the admin saying "mnt gives me a permission denied error" when they have no business running it.

    $ file /sbin/* | grep "dynamically linked" | wc -l
    325

    $ file /sbin/* | grep -i "static" | wc -l
    0