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That might not be possible. What if instead we created a configuration tool that intelligently passed the correct options for you.

Could that tool magically reduce the number of options? That would be quite a tool.

You could subdivide what gcc does into other utilities each with a smaller api.

This way lies Node.js. You'll end up with a complex config file just to orchestrate all these smaller utilities.

Yes. We will call it autotools.

For some things, yes. For example, Rust manages warnings from the source code (-Wfoo is #[warn(foo)], and it's scoped!)

Too late now. Once they exist there's someone that depends on them.