Anecdotes are also known as experience and this wasn't part of a scientific paper, it was an expression of my personal experiences using these tools. My most recent test of this was working on a container based setup for writing software and tracking the tools I needed across fedora, debian, nix and alpine. Alpine was the only one that had full coverage and kept up with versions appropriate for the use case. Other cases (more hosting oriented) were longer ago and may not be valid these days, but had similar results at the time (though not nix, it wasn't a contender back then).