The Windows situation is way different: every process is supposed to link against kernel32.dll, that's the public interface to the kernel. In Linux, glibc is just one of many C stdlib implementations, you can have many versions of glibc on the same system, etc.

Sure, but if you want dynamic loading from your c stdlib (which is defensible IMO), and you want the behavior/implementation to match with the loader, then you need some kind of coupling somewhere no?

You could have a very slim libdlopen that is used by both loader and libc, but I don't really see how that's any improvement/much different.