This statement is false as snaps also have shared runtimes known as "content snaps".

A common example is the ones with the gnome- prefix and the ones that end with -themes suffix.

Wherein snaps found themselves reinventing shared libraries - at which point, what’s really the point.

I think the point is that maintainers and developers now have a choice of whether they want to share libraries or not. Before the only choice was to share dependencies.

There has been a choice between shared and static linking since before the Linux kernel existed.

What system are you talking about?

Any modern distro. Static libraries are simply not built anymore, so you have nothing to link with, unless you rebuild the whole subsystem yourself.

If that's true, it'll be the second thing I check after making sure a distro I'm considering isn't using systemd.

Anyway, you had me worried for a minute, but:

https://packages.debian.org/source/bookworm/libs/

Click on a C library. Click on the *-dev package. There's a 1:1 mapping of .so to .a in the packages I spot checked.

Now I'll go back to enjoying Devuan.