reposting my comment from another time this discussion came up:

"Cosmopolitan has basically always felt like the interesting sort of technical loophole that makes for a fun blog post which is almost guaranteed to make it to the front page of HN (or similar) purely based in ingenuity & dedication to the bit.

as a piece of foundational technology, in the way that `libc` necessarily is, it seems primarily useful for fun toys and small personal projects.

with that context, it always feels a little strange to see it presented as a serious alternative to something like `glibc`, `musl`, or `msvcrt`; it’s a very cute hack, but if i were to find it in something i seriously depend on i think i’d be a little taken aback."