[szszrk]

Internal repo that does caching of images is rather obvious and a good practice, but it still doesn't mean that 100 pulls are that many.

Maybe we understand something different by a "small" team, but IMHO a smaller team uses more ready public images, to save time and costs. Also even not that big project on Kubernetes that includes internal software will also have a lot of other software.

Let's speculate: I had a look at some teams I know and how they work (or they would like to work soon) and it's easily 15-30 images in a CI/CD pipeline. Plus tools used to develop, but not exactly released in a build (source code management, PM, communication etc). All teams I know have 2-3 cycles developed at all times (next release, hotfix, future release after the next one). This means a lot of these tools are multiplied by 2-3 (upgrading tools as well, so multiple versions of same tool needed). If you have a few clusters that have different requirements it can also be multiplied by 2 or 3.

I would not dare to think what would happen if someone used "latest" tag in their daily work, or organized a docker/kubernetes workshop for new people :)