For the most part, MFC was and is a thin wrapper over the user32 and comctl32 libraries that ship with Windows. So the true Windows equivalent of statically linking Motif would be to statically link user32 and comctl32, and that's impossible.
Really? I have no numbers to back it up, but it felt to me that Visual Studio (and Visual C++/Basic before that) were more popular than the Borland tools.
Back in those days, Visual Studio was priced a lot higher than Borland offerings - this goes all the way back to DOS, actually. Borland had always priced its developer tools very aggressively compared to the state of the market, and they reaped the benefits. Thus, Turbo Pascal or Turbo C++ used with Turbo Vision was by far the most popular DOS TUI (as opposed to, say, VB for DOS), and OWL/VCL was the most popular Win16/32 framework, if you discount raw Win32 API (of which it was a wrapper).
Visual Basic ate a considerable chunk of Delphi's lunch in the enterprise area, where price was less of an issue, and large dev shops would buy an MSDN subscription anyway. But it was never more popular than Delphi for desktop apps.
"Was there not a version of Motif that could be statically linked?"
The GP seems to be confused about the meaning of "shared library", and seems not to be aware of the existence of static libraries -- which would (as you point out) be perfectly usable in the case of Motif.
'Perfectly usable' is a bit of a reach given how huge Motif was at the time. I shudder to think about the size of a directory with a bunch of X applications that each snarf in all their dependencies; remember we're talking 1990s.
No, GP is “grandparent”, that is, the post two posts upthread from the post in which the term is used (or, in some contexts, the user who posted the post two posts upthread.)
Similarly, GGP is “great grandparent” (3 posts up), and so on.
OP is “original post” or “original poster”, which is (in the general case) a different thing than GP.
I think I first encountered it on Slashdot a decade or more ago, but I've rarely seen it outside of Slashdot or, more recently, HN, so I think it's a Slashdottism that migrated to HN with Slashdot users.
Though I could be wrong, as my exposure to internet message boards is weirdly eclectic, but far from comprehensive.
Are you implying that "shared" = dynamically linked? Was there not a version of Motif that could be statically linked?
In the 90's, the most popular UI library for Windows was MFC (Microsoft Foundation Classes), which could be linked either statically or dynamically.