There is definitely something to be said about having minimalistic container images for security and smaller sizes...

But not having a basic text editor that is probably a few hundred KB feels a bit silly, especially given how many environment dependencies usually get packaged into containers anyways.

That's like not including any sort of a shell in your container and wondering why people are having troubles with debugging.

Personally, i think that just basing container images on something like Alpine, Debian or even Ubuntu images is good enough because those are stripped down enough already for the most part.

Of course you add a sane editor after it happens. But that first time…

I did build a arch Linux install using cat <<EOF, grep and sed. But golly it gets tedious

Sounds like pain, but also a means to getting better at sed.

ed.