I’m not OP, but at $WORK we sell a C++ library. We want to make it as easy as possible for clients to integrate it into their existing binaries. We need to be able to integrate with CMake, Meson, vcxproj, and hand-written Makefiles. We’re not the only vendor: if another vendor is using a specific cURL version, you better hope we work with it too, otherwise integration is almost impossible.

You could imagine us shipping our library as a DLL/.so and static-linking libcurl, but that comes with a bunch of its own problems.