Overriding LD doesn't seem to work

I checked out GHC from GitLab and built it with ./boot && LD=ld.gold ./configure && ./hadrian/build -j. Notice that LD was passed to ./configure as an environment variable.

Since gold leaves its identification string in the .note.gnu.gold-version section, if GHC was built with gold, we can see that using readelf. However, the following command showed nothing.

readelf -n _build/stage?/bin/ghc | grep gold

If it was built with gold, the output should look like this.

Displaying notes found in: .note.gnu.gold-version
  GNU                  0x00000009       NT_GNU_GOLD_VERSION (gold version)          Version: gold 1.16

So it looks like the LD environment variable has no effect despite the ./configure's help message. Am I missing something?