With Red Hat's UBI Micro:

  microcontainer=$(buildah from registry.access.redhat.com/ubi8/ubi-micro)
  micromount=$(buildah mount $microcontainer)
  yum install \
      --installroot $micromount \
      --releasever 8 \
      --setopt install_weak_deps=false \
      --nodocs -y \
      httpd

(from https://www.redhat.com/en/blog/introduction-ubi-micro published in 2021)

For the package management, it depends on the package manager, but most have some mechanism for installing into a root other than the currently running system.

Even without explicit support in the pacakage manager, you could also roll your own solution by running the package manager in a chroot environment, which would then need to be seeded with the package manager's own dependencies, of course (and use user-mode qemu to run pre- and post-installation scripts within the chroot in the case of cross-architecture builds).

Whether this yields a minimal container when pointed at a repository intended to be used to deploy a full OS is another question, but using a package manager to build a root filesystem offline isn't hard to pull off.

As for how to do this in the context of building an OCI container, tools like Buildah[1] exist to support container workflows beyond the conventional Dockerfile approach, providing straightforward command line tools to create containers, work with layers, mount and unmount container filesystems, etc.

[1] https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/main/README.md

There have got to be a million ways to do this by now. Some of the more principled approaches are tools like Nix (https://xeiaso.net/talks/2024/nix-docker-build/) and Bazel (https://github.com/bazel-contrib/rules_oci). But if you want to use an existing package manager like apt, you can pick it apart. Apt calls dpkg, and dpkg extracts files and runs post-install scripts. Only the post-install script needs to run inside the container.

I may be a little out of touch here, because the last time I did this, we used a wholly custom package manager.

Docker recommends using multi-stage builds e.g. Stage one image has the package manager, stage two image omits it completely, leaving only the installed software.

apk and xbps can do this. You specify a different root to work in.

Most Makefiles allow you to specify an alternate DESTDIR on install.