> I wouldn’t recommend for production but it will get you to 5mb image sizes.

Former co-worker did this, and we still have tons of docker images in production that lack basic debugging functionality like... a shell. Alpine Linux is only like 8 MB more :(

>tons of docker images in production that lack basic debugging functionality like... a shell

That's a commendable security practice. A whole class of vulnerabilities is mitigated (and others are much harder to exploit) if you don't add unnecessary junk to your images, like a shell.

It's also endorsed by Google via distroless: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless