I agree so much and wished this was the main focus of the debate. It's more a question of why does this exist in the first place and not of how did they abuse it. Building only from source is the minimum required transparency and a CI/CD pipeline able to manipulate the artifact before release takes this away. I remember the outrage, when serde (i think it was) wanted to ship parts as pre-compiled binaries for build performance reasons...

Less indirection means faster code. If the dynamic loader is already using a level of indirection and you patch into that same indirection instead of adding another, you're not making it slower.