I am not really sure. For ld.so and libc.so I may believe this. The C ABI is very stable, and if you use a new symbol from a newer glibc, you certainly depend on it, but this can also be avoided. In any case, I do not see what is fundamentally misdesigned here. I can't quite image how it could work differently. If you upgrade something so that the e ABI changed you natually need to update other components. Static linking certainly seems a very poor replacement for this.