I've spend 1 minute skimming some of the docs, but it's unclear whether these tools can do a better job than the docker-like tooling. The vmadm "build an image from scratch with a json file" doesn't help in building Hadoop any more than the oldest versions of docker did using a minimal image and a Dockerfile.

How does provide visibility into every dependency inside an image? Especially when using 3rd-party-maintained images that consist of significant hours of work per image to get the image to work.

(BTW., I built "live CD images" for use in physical and virtual machines since ~2001, using tools such as mklivecd, livecd-tools etc.).