There was work on making docker/podman use an object store which would deduplicate things and improve performance (far more likely a file the same between image

There was work on making docker/podman use an object store which would deduplicate things and improve performance (far more likely a file the same between images is in memory already) but I haven't checked to see what the status was of late. Flatpak already does this, if two Flatpak apps ship the same file, it's deduped by default I do agree the layering part of OCI images is horrible and a waste of disk space, but I don't think this is the fault of immutable distros.