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).

There’s no way my proxy binary actually requires 25GB of code, or even the 3GB it is. Sounds to me like the answer is a tree shaker.