You're probably right, but have you ever thought that maybe Debian has so much mailing list activity because it is such a huge project? There's something to be said for lightweight software. Of course, workaday devs should use the accepted best practices, but can't people experiment with better techniques until they have been proven out?
A huge community and installable packages does not mean you need to use all those packages. The smallest container I've built is about 90MB, using Ubuntu. That is pretty lightweight. Of course, the container doesn't actually do anything....
Another thing to consider: if you software works inside you self-built Ubuntu container you can be pretty sure it works on any Ubuntu install anywhere. Even if your company does not use containers everywhere, your developers can.
