This sounds a lot like emacs' old "undump" system, which ran the program, loaded a pile of elisp code, made itself dump core, then tried to massage the core dump into a runnable program.
Emacs ended up dropping that system because it was wildly incompatible with aspects of modern systems.
Modern Emacs (27 and up I think) has a new so-called "portable dumper"[^1]. I've only played a little bit with it, but it does ridiculously speed speed up some things. Don't really need it, but it's cool anyways.
That's what I was thinking. We've come full circle;-) Besides Emacs there is other software from that era that uses this technique: TeX comes to mind and also at least some Lisps.
Emacs ended up dropping that system because it was wildly incompatible with aspects of modern systems.