I think a lot of the users in Golang ecosystem want small base images because the binaries that they build ironically end up kind of large!
I am working on pod eviction in Kubernetes now when a node is low on disk. I could see some deployment models that charged image usage to the pod rather than choosing to treat shared image layers as a cost to the underlying infra even if we are not doing that yet in this first iteration. For those cases, users may think they should care more than operators want or need them to care about the image size.