Technically, they usually aren't "statically" linked as such. They usually use dynamic linking, but then ship those dynamically linked libraries in the package

Technically, they usually aren't "statically" linked as such. They usually use dynamic linking, but then ship those dynamically linked libraries in the package. This has the advantage that the user can still replace the libraries if they want (e.g. for games this is sometimes useful to replace the sdl build with one with more options enabled), and I've heard rumblings that the support for static linking on linux isn't all that great.