The Teensy Executable Revisited

I can (in fact, must when using MSVC) statically link kernel32.lib on Windows as well. It's not a C runtime/standard library, of course, but who ties their OS's user-level API to a particular implementation of a standard library of some random programming language anyhow?

Some have methods for reducing the effect of small files.

NTFS stores small files (how small depends on the amount of metadata associated with them, technically up to approximately 1KB but the limit could be <700 bytes).

Depending on options at filesystem creation time, ext4 can store small files inline in the file's inode (up to 128 bytes by default IIRC, again less depending on the presence of extra metadata, more if you have inodes larger than the default 256bytes).

Some filesystem (ZFS for one) support block sub-allocation for small files. Tail packing is available in some filesystems which not only affects small files but larger files that are just a little over a multiple of the current blocksize in length (heuristics are commonly used to determine if this is a good idea rather than applying it to all files, as it can lead to notable latency due to fragmentation on traditional storage (less so with solid-state storage)).