Yep, same here. I’ll follow your comments or posts (if you post) on the topic. Sadly I don’t have much bandwidth now but I am after the same thing. I am looking into spending ~3000 EUR for a mid-range headless Linux workstation (but will still operate it through my iMac Pro; world-class display after all! plus don’t want to buy a third set of keyboard+mouse 
) and want to heavily utilize Docker/Podman and Kubernetes/Nomad on it.
For that, I really want the absolute minimal Linux for containers (though I would be overjoyed if its super-minimal size can be translated to bare-metal but it’s not my priority).