alpine is something like busybox,
It does not use the true and tested gnu glibc, it uses musl instead.
It has its use case which is different than fedora.
Usage of Alpine in official docker images is also political decision because they have hired its main developer.
The size of the base image is not really a big deal when we have layers. It's good to have a small base image but no more than that.
I believe we should eliminate translation of command line tools. Eliminate useless i18n/l10n files, time zones, ... in some stripped base images.
Yum/dnf can be told to skip docs.
Split packages and take only needed parts.