Number of binaries is kind of a meaningless metric, especially for a system that historically follows the UNIX philosphy of each program doing one thing.
Sure, a shell is complicated and a potential risk, and perhaps it's a good idea to exclude from the base system in this context.
But I'd rather have ls, tr and wc on my system than some bespoke, all-encompassing API service that has been far less battle tested providing similar functionality.
And like you rightly pointed out, these new binaries all contain their own list of dependencies which are pulled in at build time and need to be taken into scope as well.
That's not to say Talos or its approach doesn't hold merit, but I think it's a little disengenious to simply point at the number of binaries.