[kaib]

My impression is that static linking is undervalued by developers who have not been responsible for the production deployment of binaries to larger (hundreds or hundreds of thousands of systems). When debugging production systems at that scale you want to minimize the number of moving parts given the problem is so hard to begin with.

ABI compatibility just postulates that the bytes entering and leaving the interface will be marshalled the same way. However, the semantics of the function must by definition always change when you change the implementation.

You are arguing that these semantic changes are sometimes inconsequential, like for security updates. Based on my personal experience I think a more conservative view is appropriate and any changes to the dependencies of a program should be tested before large scale deployment.