[grandiego]

> to distribute applications in the form of what are essentially tarballs of entire Linux systems.

No so bad when Linux ran from a floppy with 2Mb of RAM. Sadly every library just got bigger and bigger without any practical way to generate a lighter application specific version.

[nine_k]

Also, 64-bit code and especially data are just larger, because every address is 8 bytes, and data has to be aligned on at least 4-byte boundary.

You can still have very tiny Linux with a relatively modern kernel on tiny m0 cores, and there's ELKS for 16-bit cores.