I don't base any decisions around micro benchmarks but that example struck me as interesting because this was a case where the performance difference between using Alpine and Debian was real and affected user level applications.

For the last few years I also run Debian Slim for my base Docker images and don't worry about it.

Yes my images might be a little larger than Alpine but it's non-issue in the real world. For smaller scale deploys once the base image is pulled down initially it's there in both cases, so now it comes down to pulling app level changes (code or package deps) which is comparable in size with both distros.

And for huge scale deployments it doesn't matter because typically you'd use custom ISOs with as much pre-loaded static content as possible, so you could easily bake in a specific Debian Slim image into the ISO so when you pull down your application image at deploy time it skips having to pull the base image entirely negating any wins that Alpine might have had for pull speeds and network usage.

Sure Alpine has less attack surface since it's a smaller code base but we're comparing it to Debian here. They have a 28 year track record of being unbelievably dependable and well supported.

To contradict myself: I do find myself frustrated when 'obvious thing that should work' doesn't but I save that ire for things that break between versions!