This would be 10x faster and smaller if they just built these components into Busybox.
Package management, library management, etc are solved problems when it comes to Linux distros. The only practical improvement you can make is containers (or similar).
Static binaries cannot deal with external dependencies, and many applications require external dependencies that cannot be compiled in. But even by trying to compile-in all the dependencies, you've only shifted the complexity from the filesystem to the build system, and you still have applications with incompatible features and interfaces across versions.
> Package management, library management, etc are solved problems when it comes to Linux distros. The only practical improvement you can make is containers (or similar).
To me this basically reads as "we added a bunch of complexity on top of the problem without actually solving it". Package managers are supposed to prevent conflicts and manage giant dependency graphs, but they're so shit at doing that while actually allowing people to use whatever software they want that we've invented containers to keep everything separate again.