It's absolutely not a bad thing, indeed I think it's a good thing to use binaries from Debian. I just think the name of the project is strongly misleading. "distroless" is built from the Debian distribution, not something new made from scratch.

Not sure how widespread that view is, but that's never the association I would have made.

"Xless" is just a different way of saying "without X". "fearless" = "without fear"; "serverless" = "without a server" (yes, I know, not really); so "distroless" = "(comes) without a distribution"

So in my opinon the name correctly suggests that it's "just the package" and comes "without a distro", and not "was built without the help of a distribution".

> Binaries are binaries, whether you copied from a deb package or completely built from source code

No, they are not.

Debian packages are deployable packages, which are built around packages and services and conventions adopted and provided by the target distribution.