I use the ECL compiler for portability. Especially, sbcl has difficulty being ported to openbsd whereas ECL does not. ECL also works reliably in every context I'm aware of, except compiling to WASM (which isn't real libc), such as linux and apple phones. The c2ffi based cffi package also isn't ported to openbsd.
That combined with how easy it is to mix C and lisp to use a game library like SDL2 is my reason ! So yes ease of deployment as well (ecl is just libecl.so after all). You know, this response is just me agreeing with your two paragraphs ;p
It's not visible yet, but an executably linked object is also pretty much just (asdf:make-build "package-name" :executable t) ; I have to check I got that right.