The cause of this has always been known (within the Rust community), but it is not considered a problem. For most users, the advantages of static linking and using jemalloc significantly outweigh the cost of a 0.5mb constant overhead on binary size. Those users under different circumstances can configure their build using the tactics in this article to make a different trade off more suited to their circumstances.
I don't understand the article's point about ISP speeds. Really if you're on a slow enough ISP that a <1MB file is too large for someone to download, then practically speaking they won't be able to download anything smaller either.
Because it's not that single ~1MB file that's a problem, it's the cumulative effect. There are people on dialup and GPRS and even people who pay by the megabyte.
