The point OP makes that building distroless containers isn't hard is quite true. I put together a script (~350 lines) that uses multi-stage builds on Gentoo. It

The point OP makes that building distroless containers isn't hard is quite true. I put together a script (~350 lines) that uses multi-stage builds on Gentoo. It doesn't take much effort to match small alpine-based "official" containers. On top of that Gentoo provides excellent customisability. Things like nginx or php that have a huge amount of build options allow me building as small or as big ontainers as I need. My script also allows arbitrary combinations of packages so if you want a shell, a debugger, or whatever else you can easily add them in. The point is it was a weekend experiment. It's by no mean ideal but it's absolutely functional and viable. With a starting investment of a half engineer-weeks it's affordable to pretty much any org.