Ah, and pklite pro and lzexe from the olden days for winDOwS shit once upon a time.
Though the goal should be generating less code. Link in fewer dependencies, reduce features, DRY up duplicate logic and cut LoC. Also compile with -DNDEBUG -O2 -g- and whatever LTO switches are available for whole program optimization if you're statically linking everything together. Also be sure to include static dependencies of other static dependencies like zlib (-lz), or you'll inevitably end up with missing symbol errors when compiling a final program. LTO cuts out all (most) of the shit that you don't need and attempts to optimize across translation units.
Furthermore a consideration against static linking, on most platforms, if the same shared library is already loaded, it's reused by mmaping it into a process. Not sure that duplicating code is going to reduce memory usage or the IO it takes to load from disk. Giant runtimes like Go, Ruby, Python and fucking Java shouldn't be duplicated N times... That's just wasteful. (I hate any language with an epic runtime or VM that includes the world to do anything.). Libraries should be reserved for the few redundant things that take tons of code to implement and change very little.
If anyone wants to compile a Linux system from scratch, try LFS and hackaround with static linking. It may take patches, extra flags to get what you want.
Hope Static Linux scales, because it's easier to upgrade static programs without dependency hell but the increased memory usage of duplicated code might not be so great of a tradeoff.
Another hack would be to statically compile every system program in each directory together (/sbin/, /bin/, and parts of /usr/bin, etc) into a single executable per directory that is then symlinked to itself to select which "program" to load via argv[0]. It will be one giant exe per directory, but it will be cached basically all the time and with LTO, there won't be much duplication as with N programs compiled separately. This would take a main which dispatches to other renamed original mains and renaming all symbol conflicts across all translation units.
/bin/static
/bin/[ -> /bin/static
/bin/false -> /bin/static
/bin/true -> /bin/static
(Probably want to use hard links also)