Some form of tree-shaking type of thing would probably be quite handy for images, but yeah I'm a bit wary here as well. First thought would be what happens when it hits Out-of-Memory, DNS timeout, or loses network connectivity or another edge case that totally happens in Production.

Removing those code paths would not be a good thing, but I guess if you build your apps right you could just have your container orchestration system recover by replacing the Pod.