In the article they statically link in SQLite, It’s the reason the Go program can just be copied to a scratch image and still work.

You only need gcc during the build fase, that doesn’t change just because you run without Docker.

There’s nothing preventing you from statically link C programs either and have a single binary to deploy either. You just have to rebuild everything every single time security updates are a available. But that no different from Docker images, they need to be rebuild constantly as well.