Hmm I guess the confusion may be differing build tools and distribution methods, and of course we don't want to compare apples to oranges. The method I was referring to was pyinstaller, which on Linux, when bundling the real world example app, produces a 95 MB output, and that's just pure boilerplate. Moreover, pyinstaller claims on its website to provide smaller executables than similar tools, which is why I used this as a measurement.
After doing more research, I guess both of you may be referring to cx_freeze, which I tried, and for a oneline helloworld, it gave me a 17MB dist folder on Linux. But that is a poor example of a real world application, and I couldn't get it to bundle the example app I mentioned above, although I have no doubt it would give an output at least 95 MB, as pyinstaller did.
If you are using an alternate packer, please feel free to bundle the example app yourself, and see if you get smaller results.
For reference, the same author's implementation of the same app in Go produces a single 15MB statically linked executable on Linux, and with Go's version of size optimizations enabled, it produces a 5.1MB executable.