You do not have to use all resources that are under the systemd umbrella. That's just BS, sorry. And prod deployments breaking... Well I guess that never happened with those best-managed sysv init scripts?
Guys, pick your fights reasonably.
Tangentially, in theory, k3s + kubevirt + microvms sounds like the optimal combination for lightweight but isolated deployment.
Does anyone have experience with that?
Please show sources. Maybe no one appreciates it because it's only rumors spread by enterprises massively profiting from such rumors?
And about your toilet paper analogy: Every producer tried everything to improve output. You cannot just let your machines run faster. You also need input materials, workers and logistics to scale accordingly, which is often not possible.
The Pi is really a GPU with a CPU added on so the whole system needs to be brought up by the (binary blobs for running the) GPU. Hopefully not the case in these more PC-like systems...
Have a look at multi stage container builds. Your images should not need a build step at start, the result should be in the baked image. Else you become reliant on fetching packages during build etc.