Indeed. I'm one of the few who actually does dive into binary/asm on occasion, or at least try to decompile/reverse binaries for the lulz.
These days you probably could sneak something in with a good chance of getting away with it for a while with the complexity explosion and volume of code to go through. That doesn't mean it isn't unrecoverable from though, even if every compiler is infected.
Maybe. We're talking about a hypothetical power struggle, one aspect of which is that one group subverts the computing resource of another group. Even if at some point the second group realizes this has happened (potentially difficult when not only their decompilation tools but also their intragroup communications are subject to interception and alteration by the first group) there's no guarantee that they will ever regain control of those resources. The first group may be able to leverage their control enough to severely impact the second group's prospects in every aspect of the struggle.
More generally, when groups of people are engaged in a power struggle, there's no guarantee that things will return to the status quo ante.
Definitely did not touch on the linking toolchain in the CS101 I did. I ended up having to figure that out the hard way through Linux From Scratch builds and cobbling together weird symbol resolution environments based on wanting to do things in my own idiosyncratic way.
Ghidra helps a lot these days. ldd and the other linker/binutils do the rest.
These days you probably could sneak something in with a good chance of getting away with it for a while with the complexity explosion and volume of code to go through. That doesn't mean it isn't unrecoverable from though, even if every compiler is infected.
It's just painful is all.