In many cases you don't need 500mb of base image. Minimal "distrofull" images are in the 50mb range. But often you don't really need a real distribution inside

In many cases you don't need 500mb of base image. Minimal "distrofull" images are in the 50mb range. But often you don't really need a real distribution inside your docker image. See https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless. But distroless is not about one specific tool or base image, it's a paradigm that addresses precisely what you say (without throwing away the whale with the bathwater)