Thus, we agree the bodged binaries were a mistake, and thus have reached an awkward understanding. Your use-cases might differ, but it does not change what the artifacts look like from a optimized low-end Yocto project.
Best of luck, some of my most prized friends took 3+ years to agree with my perspectives. You should know I hold you very high regard =3
Upon the code audit, we saw heavily modified package builds where the linker was setup to strip off parts of partial libraries (far beyond what "strip --strip-unneeded" or even "-O3" would dare.) This meant the normal versioned ecosystem was always going to be out of date, potentially unstable, and difficult to curate properly.
Keep in mind there is zero justification for this trick unless constrained by minimal flash storage. My point was the situation shouldn't have featured in years (except in IoT garbage products), and using a standard build makes more sense these days even if the SoC costs $0.80/pc more.
Best of luck, some of my most prized friends took 3+ years to agree with my perspectives. You should know I hold you very high regard =3