> But you can't take .so files and make one "static" binary out of them.

Yes you can!

This is more-or-less what unexec does

- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21394916

For some reason nobody seems to like this sorcery, probably because it combines the worst of all worlds.

But there's almost[1] nothing special about what the dynamic linker is doing to get those .so files into memory that it can't arrange them in one big file ahead of time!

[1]: ASLR would be one of those things...