I guess the key thing is that they promise the security fixes for 12 years.

This is interesting, because in large org you ofren have lot of stuff you just want to keep on running with minimal changes.

Probably not, I've never tried it. But I assume you can waste a bit of time puzzling out the few things to include which are actually needed every time, and a distroless image has that pre-puzzled for you.

If I wanted to be so specific about what's going into my images I'd probably just build them with nix.

I would say a lot of developers don't really know their way around a Linux distro as well as you might think?

It's the same logic as frameworks or other building blocks: why leave all these decisions up to individual teams, when everyone should be doing things more or less the same way?

If need to do something custom, you'll know what you're doing and you can do that. Otherwise, use good defaults provided by people who know better than you.