> Imagine debugging an app on this (and possibly not even knowing it's based on an unofficial base image) not knowing this very specific behavior for hours with no results, you'd probably have a very bad impression of alpine.

That's fine! I've seen this happen with Rails all the time: newbies do something in Rails behaves differently in Rails than in vanilla Ruby, because Rails redefines core Ruby classes in ActiveSupport, and they get frustrated and angry when the thing they've copied from elsewhere doesn't work as they expect. Whether that's good or not is another matter, but that doesn't mean Ruby should prevent people from running Rails! You really shouldn't be obsessed with people liking your project to the point where you prevent anybody from doing anything with it that you haven't personally authorized.