Why are debug symbols so big? For C++, they’ll include detailed type information for every instantiation of every type everywhere in your program, including the types of every field (recursively), method signatures, etc. etc., along with the types and locations of local variables in every method (updated on every spill and move), line number data, etc. etc. for every specialization of every function. This produces a lot of data even for “moderate”-sized projects.

Worse: for C++, you don’t win much through dynamic linking because dynamically linking C++ libraries sucks so hard. Templates defined in header files can’t easily be put in shared libraries; ABI variations mean that dynamic libraries generally have to be updated in sync; and duplication across modules is bound to happen (thanks to inlined functions and templates). A single “stuck” or outdated .so might completely break a deployment too, which is a much worse situation than deploying a single binary (either you get a new version or an old one, not a broken service).