Considering that projects nowadays have all dependencies installed into their folders, what else is both viable and much smaller? If we had to install everything required for a hello.c into c_modules, including a compiler, libc, etc, it wouldn’t take less than 34mb.

Of course a counter argument is that you don’t usually swap C compilers between projects and libc is stable af, but if a toolchain and/or stdlib was constantly changing and subject to non-compat, you’d have to.