This has been happening for a long time, and came up in D6593 with full build
options enabled this time. I've spent hours in the past trying to change the
order with no luck, so this sidesteps the issue entirely.

The documentation for --start-group says this:

Using this option has a significant performance cost. It is best to use it only
when there are unavoidable circular references between two or more archives.

However I did not find any performance impact on linking time, using the gold
linker that we use by default. The resulting Blender binary is just 20 bytes
bigger, so basically the same.