Open up your executable with depends.exe and run the profiler built into depends. I believe this will log why all your dlls are loaded, and from where they are loaded. See the "Log LoadLibrary function calls" option.
I have the solution to my problem. It was a stupid mistake left there from ancient times probably.
msvcrt.lib was explicitly mentioned by us in the Additional Dependencies box :-( so of course it made the dll a dependency. And because of all the open-source libraries that box has a lot of text so we didn't notice it. And to be honest we didn't even think of looking at that box carefully since we didn't imagine there could be such a gross mistake in our projects.