Sometimes I don't understand why people use those most tiny of images, at least for anything that they might ever ssh into.

When there is no corresponding level of restraint in the libraries that we add to most applications, does it really make a difference to leave out the likes of curl, nano, ping, etc compared to how frustrating it is to operate in just busybox (etc)?

I'm not just ranting, I'd actually like someone who swears by always shipping alpine images (etc) and never installing any basic utilities in them to share their reasoning.

neither is bash or even sh for that matter :) if you have bash, you probably have apk or apt