[eternalban]

I was surprised by this. (Rich is rigorously perceptive and characteristically peels conflations apart.) Here, he seems to be conflating linker responsibilities with (unit-module) dependency management concerns.

If deployment-unit-A depends on du-B, but system-language level dependencies have additional subtleties, then that is fine, since someone like RH could be looking into code stripping of unreachable/dead-code on linking, and I'd be completely surprised if that hasn't been already looked at extensively to date.

Yes, you would sacrifice some transfer bandwidth/time on artifact acquisition but keep conceptual models local and their implementations simpler. Or, looking at it from another point of view, OP should consider that a 'dependency' is maximally the provider of objects in context of its namespace.