The term makes a lot of sense when you read it as having the package manager at it's core, which also happens to be the update mechanism. But in the container w

The term makes a lot of sense when you read it as having the package manager at it's core, which also happens to be the update mechanism. But in the container world, that would be an idle update mechanism and package management (as in selecting the subset of installed stuff) is also handled through image selection. But an image created from scratch by whoever would be considered end user in the container world would still contain the package manager of the distribution used to set up whatever is eventually imaged. With this as the baseline, distributionless is either an image that has this umbilical removed, or, as purists would probably prefer, an image where the package manager has never existed because everything was set up without involving one, or set up from the outside, without ever running anything "inside".