Again, consider that you are creating this dichotomy, not the tools, or vast majority of practitioners in this space. Docker comes with (and encourages) lots of ways to persist state, as do orchestration environments like Kubernetes and ECS and you should choose the approach that suits the problem you are solving. If you want containers as lightweight VM's, there are a ton of ways to do that and they are actively supported.

I'm reluctant to get off-topic here, because the narrative relating to the actual post should be "Does it makes sense to have openssh in a minimal ubuntu base image", to which the answer is "No, obviously".