Also the only approach for systems where people advocate for static linking everything, yet another reason why dynamic loading became a thing.
Most of these systems came with utilities to partially automate the process, some kind of config file to drive it, Netware 2.x even had TUI menuing apps (ELSGEN, NETGEN) to assist in it
The sys admin scripts would even relink just to merely change the ip address of the nic! (I no longer remember the details, but I think I eventually dug under the hood and figured out how you could edit a couple files and merely reboot without actually relinking a new kernel. But if you only followed the normal directions in the manual, you would use scoadmin and it would relink and reboot.) And this is not because SCO sux. Sure they did, but that was actually more or less normal and not part of why they sucked.
Change anything about which drives are connected to which scsi hosts on which scsi ids? fuggeddabouddit. Not only relink and reboot, but also pray and have a bootable floppy and a cheat sheet of boot: parameters ready.
Incremental compilation means you don't have to recompile everything just compile the new driver as a library and relink the kernel and you're done. Keep the prior n number of working ones around in case the new one doesn't work.