Sadly, real C standard libraries are anything but small. glibc is pretty huge; statically linking a simple hello world program produces something like 750KB of output (libc.so itself is nearly 2MB in size). A quick peek at glibc's documentation shows just how much stuff there is: https://www.gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_mono/libc.html.

Unfortunately, I wouldn't call all of it critically useful stuff. For example, "strfry" and "memfrob" are useless beyond toy applications as neither are remotely secure; "l64a" and "a64l" are useless (and possibly even dangerous) because they look like they implement base64 but with a different alphabet (and a much worse API); they have a hilariously large number of random number generators, _none_ of which produce high-quality random numbers for simulation or especially cryptography; etc. etc.

Neither MSVC nor macOS will let you truly statically link a binary (because the system interfaces aren't constant), so it's harder to directly compare, but on macOS "libSystem.dylib" depends on basically everything in /usr/lib/system which is about 5MB of code.

So yeah, I don't think I'd call many real libc libraries "small" by any stretch.