It's worth mentioning that libextractor has a bunch of similar design consideraints to libcurl, both dynamically link against many external libraries, most of which are rarely used, both run on many platforms, etc. But libextractor.so and extract are linked directly against relatively few external dependencies.

Instead of directly linking to libraries it only rarely uses, libextractor builds a shared object plugin for the different filetypes it supports, and those shared objects link against the external libraries they need. See : https://www.gnu.org/software/libextractor/

I'd imagine doing this with libcurl would be an unpleasently large change, but if done well it'd buy libcurl users some additional flexibility. At minimum, it'd simplify packaging libcurl for distributions that usually do not want stuff like LDAP, SSH, etc. but cannot exclude them all outright. And importantly plugins would aid in tightening AppArmor and SELinux profiles for applicaitons that use libcurl. It might therefore be worth considering such a change for "some future version".