A great deal of the cruft in modern distros comes from docs, example configs, etc -- things Alpine does a great job of cutting out. Obviously a glibc variant is

A great deal of the cruft in modern distros comes from docs, example configs, etc -- things Alpine does a great job of cutting out. Obviously a glibc variant is going to have a much larger memory footprint, and (arguably) is less secure than an musl libc distro, but it gains the ability to run glibc-only software (cough Oracle Java cough) without having to ship around container/host images with all the extra junk deb packages bring along for the ride.