In the previous article I emphasized the importance of not having a third-party loading library like glew because OpenGL is too complex and unpredictible. For example, if you want to implement a videogame with an average graphics and a large audience of users, probably OpenGL 2.1 is enough. At this point, you may need to load only that part of the library and make the right check of the extensions or just use the functions that have been promoted to the core of the current version. Remember that an extension is not guaranteed to be present on that version of OpenGL if it's not a core feature and this kind of extensions has been introduced after 3.0 to maintain the forward compatibility.
For instance, it's useful to check the extension GL_ARB_vertex_buffer_object only on OpenGL 1.4 (in that case you may want to use glBindBufferARB instead of glBindBuffer) but not on superior versions because it has been promoted to the core from the version 1.5 onward. The same applies to other versions of the core and extensions. If you target OpenGL 2.1, you have to be sure that the extensions tipically used by 2.1 applications have not been promoted to the latest OpenGL 4.5 version and to check the extenions on previous versions of the library, making sure to use the appropriate vendor prefix, like ARB. Even if with glew you can make this kind of check before using the loaded functions, I don't recommend it because glewInit() is going to load also parts that you don't want to use and you run the risk to understimate the importance of checking the capabilities.
Anyway, reading the OpenGL spec and add manually the required extensions is a time expensive job that you may don't have the time to do. Recently, the Khronos group has released an xml file where there is a detailed description of the extensions and the functions for every version of the library, it is also used to generate the gl.h and the glext.h header files with a script in Python. In the same way, you can program a script that parses the gl.xml file to generate your own loading library, making the appropriate check of the extensions and including only the part that you really need to load on your project. You can find the gl.xml file here: