The "manpages" and any "locale" packages are neither required nor important so are not included in a Debian minbase install. If you want them, you can install them easily with apt.
I'm not sure what you mean by apt being stripped down. You get the normal apt still.
I think you can achieve the same thing on bare metal by being careful to tell it not to install a bunch of base package sets.
Alpine is more container-focused than debian, so I imagine they default to something closer to `-slim`, but I haven't tried installing it on bare metal or in a VM.