I aim for "small images" because downloading a full install of Ubuntu is rediculous on anything but gigabit fibre.

But I don't aim for minimal images. Using alpine and installing what ever you like without worrying about all the bullshit to make caches stay empty still results in images only a few megs, don't need to do much better than that.

Though I tend to agree, if you're talking about a compiled language. Static binary and there is little need for anything other than `from scratch`.