What is the problem you're trying to solve

Importing the plugin standard library package makes binaries significantly bigger, due to disabling some dead code elimination (cmd/link/internal/ld/deadcode.go) and symbol names being longer (cmd/link/internal/ld/lib.go).

github.com/containerd/containerd imports github.com/containerd/containerd/plugin which imports plugin on amd64:

As shown in DataDog/datadog-agent#32538, just removing the import on amd64 reduces the size of one of our binaries from 218MB to 150MB (-31%).

I would like to suggest adding a specific build tag to remove this import. I know using the static_build tag would do the same, but since it is used by many other dependencies I'm worried it would have unexpected consequences...

Describe the solution you'd like

Have a way to use containerd v1 types and functions without having to import the plugin package, and without changing behavior of other dependencies.

Additional context

No response