The tool chain to build/deploy/run/validate is the whole point to containers. It's something that unifies the deployment model of applications, unless you want

The tool chain to build/deploy/run/validate is the whole point to containers. It's something that unifies the deployment model of applications, unless you want to commit to a single programming language ecosystem. And not every ecosystem has tools to create a monolithic deployment artifact. Even if you have monolithic deployment artifacts: by the time you have solved all the use cases that the image distribution workflow cover, you have basically reverse-engineered it. If you have already done that, kudos to you, you indeed don't need that workflow. And you probably will find it very easy to containerise those artifacts should you ever need to.