they don't actually seem to be needed in the crosstool-ng toolchains like the wiki one you linked to or esp-open-sdk.
people need to move away from using dodgy vm's that are running some unknown version of what appears to be a closed toolchain, to proper gcc toolchains.
unfortunately the xp vm seems to be the only way to reliably compile nodemcu at least, so we need to spot the difference and figure out why.