I use the Alpine userland and so totally understand the reasoning of having less bloated tooling and the like. However, personally I prefer to apply this philosophy to stuff I have running in the background. If I'm using initscripts, I'd rather they be written using execline (and ideally running with s6) rather than bash, if it has to be a version of sh then I prefer dash over bash, builtins over external tools, nginx over apache, and so on.

But having used busybox utils on a daily basis I truly do not understand how people can use them daily and not go insane. The GNU utils are so much faster and more feature-filled. To me, reducing bloat makes sense for something running forever in the background. Interactive stuff ought to be as feature-filled as possible, stuff in the background as lean it can.

I realise others have different views about this, but I think I hew fairly closely to the mainstream thought about bloat.