Yes, part of the usual process of making a tiny binary is jettisoning much of the overhead that debuggers depend on in order to find their way through an extern

Yes, part of the usual process of making a tiny binary is jettisoning much of the overhead that debuggers depend on in order to find their way through an external program. Not just the debugging symbols themselves, but things like section header tables and maintenance of linked stack frames in the running code. Dumping all of that saves space, at the expense of making the resulting binary more and more opaque.