The "can I link Mesa statically" journey was futile, I had much less understanding how things worked back then (not that I'm any kind of an expert now, but you shouldn't be one to ship a f.in game). See, a pretty big chunk of the graphics driver stack on Linux sits in the .so's provided by Mesa: the i915_dri.so, r600_dri.so, nouveau_dri.so, libvulkan_intel.so, libvulkan_radeon.so, etc are ALL exactly what it says on the package. It's not just 50+MB of x86-64 code, it's also your peace of mind that whenever AMD/Intel/NVidia/Apple/RPi/etc drop a new GPU model, or whenever the kernel changes things on their end, you don't need to relink and re-release.

I'm torn between "all of this stuff belongs in the kernel goddammit" and "these guys probably know better". OpenBSD and macOS actually force all syscalls to go through a dynamically linked libc, so perhaps it's the latter.

Libraries/frameworks/engines such as PICO-8, Love2d, SDL, Allegro, Pygame, Godot, etc exist precisely to abstract away these details; you're not meant to care for libGL.so.1, you're meant to care for fixing your physics engine's timestep and using cubic splines to interpolate animation. Love2d was not a mature choice in 2016, so don't take my horror story or my hubris as any indication of what it looks like today; do your own research and pick the tool for the job ;)

TBH I would love to go back to making games, but recently got too absorbed by StarCraft 2 and shitposting.