Also, though I love Alpine, it uses Musl instead of Glibc. Some giant amount of the supply chain uses Glibc. You could convert everything to Musl, but then you would probably have performance hits on all kinds of things, so you would be trading CPU for Disk. Also, this could take TONS of time and money to figure out what is missing in Musl (including syscall mapping (not even sure it exists in other c libraries), etc)

Nothing is free, nothing. Building a cool new C library (musl) is fun. Maintaining one for 10, 20, or 30 years (glibc) is work (and fun)...

Careful, it's not the base image size. It's the environment size. If you don't put enough in your base image, you will have bloat everywhere. If you put too much, it will cause slow start (caching takes a while).

It's a balancing act. It's not easy. But, if you use a package exactly twice in your environment, then putting it in the base image actually makes sense.

Think at scale, not about individual images.