A standard Docker container with a NodeJS/PHP/Python app is usually around 200-300 MB (yes really), the OpenJDK JVM is around a hundred MB, but a fully statically compiled rust binary that doesn't even depend on libc is just a couple MB and can be deployed as a tiny distroless Docker container.

It's a lot heavier than your 8kb C++ executable but it's nothing compared to what is required to deploy anything else.