Long answer: Not OP, but sometimes you’re in a throwaway env and want to quickly do a DNS query and don’t have any tools (like Ubuntu minimal) available. Spawning an ephemeral container isn’t a bad idea in that case.
Short answer: Why not :)
I don't specifically know Ubuntu minimal. But suggesting that a minimal OS has containerd pre-installed isn't exactly the "minimal" I'm thinking of.
It's a lot of code to "just run a UDP packet" IMHO.
That's also where declarative package managers such as Nix and Guix shine. You can temporarily "install" packages that can be cleaned up later, garbage-collection style. Besides being their own distros, both can be used as add-on package managers on other Linux distros, for example.
Have you ever heard of Nix?
Which trouble? The image gets pulled once. Running it is pretty straightforward and fast enough. And not much work to clean up if you don’t use it. Beside that I don’t have to care about the right package manager.
But then I‘m also a person that prefers npx to global npm installs.
You want an upfront assurance that there's not going to be any bullshit. There's nothing that technically prevents a docker container from failing, of course. But seeing that someone took the extra step to make one is enough assurance. And it also protects the author from incoming "it doesn't work on my machine" bs.
Makes it easy to drop it into a k8s cluster, maybe?