But power corrupts, and once you've got everyone linking to your `libc`, the temptation to get some combination of lazy around standards compliance at best, and seduced by what amounts to proprietary vendor API lock-in to push your politics in at least some cases seemingly becomes overwhelming. Add in LLVM kicking your ass from here to FreeBSD with Stallman freaking the fuck out about `gcc`'s plunging relevance and there's understandable but still not acceptable instinct to go further into incompatible-by-design. People on here routinely lose their shit because NVIDIA or whoever makes it a nightmare to interoperate, and I don't like it either, but vendor lock-in is vendor lock-in.
`emacs` talks to the LSP servers via JSON for Christ's sake, which only makes it about 100x laggier, but you can see why they did it, because just like Docker even RMS can't convince anyone that What We Went With is "linking". God bless the VSCode people for accepting the performance penalty so that the rest of us can come to the party, they could have muscled LSP out of the way IMO and didn't. So `rust-analyzer` gets to shovel megabytes of JSON around and Docker gets to (figuratively) tarball a bunch of `.so` files so that `ldd` can "dynamically" link them.
The thing is, this way lies irrelevance. Even the GNU userland is pretty optional these days. Is Alpine, as I've taken to calling it, "GNU plus Linux"? Is NixOS? What are we putting up with this shit for? Bash?
And now we have this "hybrid linking" thing: static image containing dynamically linked libraries.
Bundling dependecies is essentially static linking that doesn't violate the GPL. Static linking means all dependencies are compiled into the binary. Modern technology like docker, appimages, snaps, etc. all emulate that by creating a static image with all the dependencies and then dynamically linking to those specific libraries. So now we have a secondary linker and loader on top of the operating system's.