C library is smaller than Node.js (you won’t have HTTP). What C have is much more respectable libraries. If you add libcurl or freetype to your project, it won’t pull the whole jungle with them.

What C doesn't have is an agreed-upon standard package manager. Which means that any dependency - including transitive ones! - requires some effort on behalf of the developer to add to the build. And that, in turn, puts pressure on library authors to avoid dependencies other than a few well-established libraries (like libpng or GLib),

You can add curl to a Rust project too.

But why, when reqwest is enough for 99% of cases.

Because it requires using async, and for most programs async is not worth the extra effort (plus very heavy dependency in the form of Tokio).

It requires Tokio, and believe it or not there are actual cases for non-async rust. So you can't use it in that case.

It's bloated.