OP here, it was also my opinion that the handling of static libraries should significantly be improved, and ld should have a "--static-lib" flag to properly handle it. Sadly, the ELF committee prefers a more subtle approach, hence even the proposed build of the static bundle object is done on top of the existing "ld -r", and the output is still wrapped inside a .a archive for compatibility.

I hope that once integrated to linkers the adoption of this new format will help convince that it deserves significantly better tooling.