spiral wrote:
>What might I be missing here?

I don't know.  I used the configuration you supplied (though without
'LDFLAGS=--static') and it worked as I would expect:

$ PATH= ./busybox sh
$ ls
AUTHORS                 busybox-config          loginutils
Config.in               busybox_unstripped      mailutils
... several lines removed ...
archival                libbb                   util-linux
busybox                 libpwdgrp
$ which ls
$ 

This was on Fedora 33 with gcc.  What platform are you using?

Ron
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