You want to ship every debug utility you will need in every image? Just seems wasteful. What about 3rd party images, you will respin images just to add your preferred toolset?

Nope, not my position at all. I want to have a minimal OS environment with rudimentary tools available with zero extra friction. FROM alpine:latest adds less than 10MB and covers 95% of use cases. Typically depending on the container I will often throw in curl and some other QoL tools too.

For the rare cases where you find yourself needing to attach a debugger to your pods running in staging/prod, a debug container is absolutely the right tool to reach for.