[0xbadcafebee]

Yeah; specifically, if your developers don't use the distroless containers to develop their apps (or stop using them when they become burdensome to update), then the environments are becoming divergent, which will lead to divergent behavior. The solution [incl. for things like vulnerability management] is the same idea behind Shift Left: move as much of the work "left" (earlier) in the pipeline/value stream/etc as possible.

The more you shift left, the smaller the distance from dev to prod, the better the outcomes. Whatever environment the developers want to use to develop, make the production system the same; then improve the development environment in order to improve production. Over time this will need to change as complex systems are hard to replicate locally. But the closer they are, the better.