Correct. I would not be surprised if those two Golang projects take less than the size of the dependency. 2x is a degenerate worst-case. With static linking,

Correct. I would not be surprised if those two Golang projects take less than the size of the dependency. 2x is a degenerate worst-case. With static linking, you only need to pull in things you actually need (and you can optimize from there!), whereas with dynamic linking you need to pull in the entire dependency regardless. (You only need to pull in one copy regardless of how many things are using the library, true. But you need to pull in one full copy always.) There are very few cases where you actually use the entire library in a project - and if you are indeed using an entire library in a project your project is necessarily large enough compared to the library that it's not much overhead percentage-wise.