You are unlikely to find what you're looking for. I'm going to dig into this article a bit, but what you're talking about is inherently hard, and delivers tremendous value to businesses. There are a lot of people doing it for money, and someone builds something that starts to actually work, they get acquired, or they take their project and make it enterprise-y (because that's where the funding is).

There's flatcar and k3os and fedora coreos and talos and lokomotive. There are maybe a dozen others as well, but those are the ones I know something about.

The real problem is that the orchestration of PXE boot, DHCP, name services, server registration, cluster bootstrapping, while simultaneously building a light distribution that makes the right calls on persistence, security, etc. is just *really hard*.

I took at a stab at it myself (failed startup) and have a custom distribution based on alpine, but the amount of work to go from there to everything is so large that it's tough to take on if you're small (and there is the constant desire to go enterprise because of the money)