> TLDR; The C++ standard library sets up exception handling infrastructure early on, allocating memory for an “emergency pool” to be able to allocate memory for exceptions in case malloc ever runs out of memory.

Reminds me of Perl's $^M: https://perldoc.perl.org/variables/$%5EM

In Perl you can "hand-manage" that. This line would allocate a 64K buffer for use in an emergency:

    $^M = 'a' x (1 << 16);