Linking everything static is a huge pain in the ass.
Case in point.

My dependencies are fontconfig, harfbuzz, fribidi and freetype. In static link I have to list all indirect deps, too, so the list grows a bit: graphite, glib, pcre, z, png, expat. Note that this is internal detail of third party libraries, and may change when the base system is updated.

I also need to install all the -dev packages.

Also, fribidi and graphite packages don't include static libraries. I need to build them from source. More autocrap.

There goes my day, and I have not yet run my 5-line fuzzer once.

The solution is to include shared libraries with the fuzzer. Just put them in the same directory and use RPATH or LD_LIBRARY_PATH. The list of shared libraries can be generated automatically with recursive readelf/ldd walk. Can we support that?