Address space is abundant enough on 64-bit platforms that we even waste a lot of it on security mitigations. Symbols tables are overhead, but loading multiple

Address space is abundant enough on 64-bit platforms that we even waste a lot of it on security mitigations. Symbols tables are overhead, but loading multiple libs also involves all sorts of overhead. The disk space argument makes the most sense, but binary code doesn't take up a lot of disk space these days; a vast majority is typically used for data, media, the latest large AI model etc. Having larger shared libraries also means you no longer have to statically link that included code into multiple separate executables.