[account42]

> It is perfectly possible to build a Win32-only binary that is fully self-contained and only around 1 KiB.

Good luck actually distributing that binary to users without all the various kinds of scareware in the way yelling DANGER.

[delta_p_delta_x]

That's a matter of code signing and SmartScreen, both of which are completely orthogonal to how the binary is built.

[account42]

You may or may not be able to pay the protection money to get around the warnings but it is not at all orthogonal to how the binary is build - the scareware industry (both Microsoft as well as third parties) absolutely despises executables that deviate from the default MSVC output.