Yes, I know so much of Alpine’s lightweightness comes from not using glibc.
But still, the other options I see are far from being slimmed down. Debian, Ubuntu server, CentOS… They all could use some cuts.
What’s the most slimmed down non-desktop distro that still has a glibc base? I honestly don’t care if it has its own package manager (build tool handles this for me). Just wanna use it in containers for running server apps.
You could also use Void Linux with glibc but install base-minimal instead of base-system when following this guide: https://docs.voidlinux.org/installation/guides/chroot.html They also have a docker image using busybox (the other thing that makes alpine that minimal). So you could have a look at how they setup it and try that yourself. It is not well tested tho, so it’s probably not a good idea for a server.