I meant installing just what you need, like web servers and such. Probably should have written that in the original comment. You need to do that on any other operating system anyway, including any of the BSDs.
If you just need a plain system to drop a statically linked binary onto, Debian minimal install is perfectly usable right out of the box, and (IIRC) ships fewer components than OpenBSD.
The first point equally applies to Alpine and any system built from Debian minimal install ("built" is too strong a word, all you need to do is `apt install` several packages).
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/nftables