[dozzie]

> I've seen so many developers build giant unwieldy images because there's been no easy way to manage build dependencies that didn't end with bloat.

Uhm... What? No, there was, around two decades older than Docker itself. It's just that developers avoid using tools that were written for sysadmins.

If you build a binary package with your application and another one with your application's dependencies, you avoid all that bloat you mention. Though it's not sexy, because it's an old method and uses things already present in operating system.