Yes, inlining (and LTO can take it a notch or two higher) does away with the problem altogether, however the number of projects that default to «-Os» (or even to «-O2») to build a release product is substantial to large.

There is also a significant number of projects that go to great lengths to force-override CFLAGS/CXXFLAGS (usually with «-O2 -g» or even with «-O») or make it extraordinary difficult to change the project's default CFLAGS, for no apparent reasons which eliminates a number of advanced optimisations in builds with default build settings.