In normal userland you have lots of RAM, and the whole virtual address space to play with, and you can make any part of it you like either read-only or read-wri

In normal userland you have lots of RAM, and the whole virtual address space to play with, and you can make any part of it you like either read-only or read-write, so it doesn't matter much if you end up with either (a) a fixed offset between the code section and the rw data section or (b) a big global offset table. As the article points out, those are more awkward in a small-RAM microcontroller environment with no virtual memory.