I think you meant "former case" rather than "latter case", but even with compiled programs it can be a little more complex, particularly for a dynamically linke

I think you meant "former case" rather than "latter case", but even with compiled programs it can be a little more complex, particularly for a dynamically linked program and especially if your program or libraries use dynamic loading. OpenSSL can do some dynamic loading and depend on environment variables and filesystem artifacts in surprising ways as well. If your program uses any hardcoded paths, it gets more complex as well. I find it pretty easy to write a program to run in a very minimal docker image, but compiling existing software for the same can be quite hard, and legacy libraries and application code make it even harder. For somebody who is just learning to program, they could easily never really learn the right techniques, because the wrong ones really do just work fine for them. Like electron, these things are very wasteful, but they do work pretty reliably.