Suckless has a project to get a fully static compiled Linux environment. Unfortunately I don't know how far that have come
As far as I know, the only completely statically linked Linux distribution that is actively developed is my own project (inspired by stali), oasis: https://github.com/oasislinux/oasis
1) when making a static link archive (a .a file), include a .o with a static symbol(s) whose values(s) records the metadata that ELF would have recorded, which here is: a) dependencies, b) how to find them, c) the mapfile / version-script (at least which symbols are symbolic, protected, or demoted to local, and which, if any, are interposers.
2) on final link-edits only the direct dependency -lfoo arguments should be needed, and then link-editor should find the dependencies' dependencies... by looking at the metadata recorded in the .a files.
Really, it's very simple. libstool is a very bad attempt at layering this on top of the linker (recording metadata in .la files), but it doesn't work well. This functionality has to be in the linkers.