[gnufx]

Apart from the general system management advantages of dynamic libraries, they provide an important extensibility/customization mechanism (e.g. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/emacs-paper.html for an early mention).

High performance computing systems typically use dynamic linking extensively for that. One example: The hooks for profiling and tool support in the MPI standard for parallel programming pretty much depend on an LD_PRELOAD-type mechanism to be useful. Another: You can cope with the mess due to missing policy on BLAS libraries in Fedora/EPEL (unlike Debian) by using OpenBLAS replacements for the reference and ATLAS libraries; have them preferred by ld.so.conf and get a worthwhile system-wide speed increase on your Sandybridge nodes with EPEL packages.

Anyhow, rebuilding a static system to address a problem with a library ignores all its uses in user programs. The ability to adjust things via properly-engineered dynamic libraries really has a lot more pros than cons in my non-trivial experience. The use of rpath ("ones referencing specific paths"?) is mostly disallowed by packaging rules in the GNU/Linux distributions I know, so I'm not sure where that comment came from, and it tends to defeat the techniques above.