An often overlooked virtue of small statically-linked binaries is that they can used in a shell pipeline or script without unacceptably degrading performance due to the time needed to load them.

Larger statically-linked binaries obviously take more time to load.

Those using shared libraries or runtime environments are even worse (unless, of course, other programs using the same libraries or environment have already been loaded into memory -- which is one of the reasons I have a longstanding complaint about what I call "vanity libraries", which their authors distribute as shared libs but which are only ever used by their own programs and almost never at the same time. I.e., they're not really "shared" at all. They're just wasting time doing the work to locate the library, load it, and resolve the references to the code therein.)

Sorry for the rant!

EDIT: yes, I know there are ways to map files into memory without actually copying the data until it's needed. But I think my point still stands, because the larger the code the more likely a cache miss is going to be. (Especially if the code is poorly organized with respect to locality.)