There's a pretty strong culture of "no static linking because I need to replace the .so to preserve my freedom hurr durr" in a lot of Linux spaces, so quite a few of these C/C++ FOSS libraries are a pain in the ass to statically link.

Literally last week I was porting something to Linux and had to rewrite the libwayland build scripts because they only expose a shared object.

There's also an expectation that you're going to install them via your system's package manager, not build them, so a lot of them use insane build systems (autotools, meson).