But if your tool chain is worth anything the size of each binary shouldn't be bigger. To oversimplify things a bit: it's just #ifdefs and a proper tool chain.

In the web development world on the other hand everything was always awful. Every nodejs package has half the world as dependencies...

No, because forking a distro and updating some hundred thousands of PCs is not done in a week.

Edit: and why would we go with Ubuntu...