I've found myself exec-ing into containers a lot less often recently. Kubernetes has ephemeral containers for debugging. This is of limited use to me; the problem is usually lower level (container engine or networking malfunctioning) or higher level (app is broke, and there is no command "fix-app" included in Debian). For the problems that are lower level, it's simplest to resolve by just ssh-ing to the node (great for a targeted tcpdump). For the problems that are higher level, it's easier to just integrate things into your app (I would die without net/http/pprof in Go apps, for example).

I was an early adopter of distroless, though, so I'm probably just used to not having a shell in the container. If you use it everyday I'm sure it must be helpful in some way. My philosophy is as soon as you start having a shell on your cattle, it becomes a pet, though. Easy to leave one-off fixes around that are auto-reverted when you reschedule your deployment or whatever. This has never happened to me but I do worry about it. I'd also say that if you are uncomfortable about how "exec" lets people do anything in a container, you'd probably be even more uncomfortable giving them root on the node itself. And of course it's very easy to break things at that level as well.