There's a lot of tooling built on static binaries:

- google-wide profiling: the core C++ team can collect data on how much of fleet CPU % is spent in absl::flat_hash_map re-bucketing (you can find papers on this publicly)

- crashdump telemetry

- dapper stack trace -> codesearch

Borg literally had to pin the bash version because letting the bash version float caused bugs. I can't imagine how much harder debugging L7 proxy issues would be if I had to follow a .so rabbit hole.

I can believe shrinking binary size would solve a lot of problems, and I can imagine ways to solve the .so versioning problem, but for every problem you mention I can name multiple other probable causes (eg was startup time really execvp time, or was it networked deps like FFs).