cgltf

That's what inevitably happens when you make transitive dependencies easy and you have a culture of "if there's a library for it you must use it!" C/C++ are the only widely used languages without a popular npm-style package manager, and as a result most libraries are self-contained or have minimal, and often optional dependencies. efsw [1] is a 7000 lines (wc -l on the src directory) C++ FS watcher without dependencies. The single-header libraries that are popular in the game programming space (stb_* [2], cgltf [3], etc) as well as of course Dear ImGui [4] have been some of the most pleasant ones I've ever worked with. At this point I'm convinced that new package managers forbidding transitive dependencies would be an overall net gain. The biggest issue are large libraries that other ones justifiably depend on - OpenSSL, zlib, HTTP server

I recently discovered this pattern in cgltf (https://github.com/jkuhlmann/cgltf), and I agree, it makes deployment so much nicer.

The rendering engineers on Cyberpunk are definitely career experts. But, hobbyists can get impressive results in their spare time. IMHO, a good target to shoot for is to write your own https://www.khronos.org/gltf/ viewer. It's a scalable goal that you can take as far as you like. Start with https://github.com/jkuhlmann/cgltf to handle loading the data. Check the sidebar of https://www.reddit.com/r/opengl/ for tutorials.