This isn't true. Yes, Go packages are all statically compiled into a single binary (so you don't have a separate .so for each import path) but the actual binari

This isn't true. Yes, Go packages are all statically compiled into a single binary (so you don't have a separate .so for each import path) but the actual binaries haven't been statically linked by default (or at all in some cases) for a very long time. For instance -- Go has to link to glibc, and glibc doesn't provide proper support for static compilation (you _can_ do it but it's not actually supported in the RHEL sense by glibc upstream). And even when you force Go (through several magic incantations) to give you a static binary, networking and similar code will still use NSS (which uses dlsym and thus still requires dynamic libraries on the host to be installed).