The simplicity of Alpine and the lack of systemd is what drew me to it. I have converted all my routers, firewalls, VM's and home appliances to Alpine. I do not have a single regret.
Sure, I like having a distro that defaults to not using GNU (if nothing else, to flavor the GNU/Linux naming debate), but there's nothing wrong with allowing GNU or others to be used. Further, Alpine already packages GNU tools, so I prefer the most elegant implementation possible.
If that's indeed the case, I think it might be because of the fear of license trouble ie the whole business of Docker images referencing/installing a Debian base as the first thing always had the smell of a GPL circumvention device to me, in part at least. But it seems license holders don't really bother, or we've heard about it by now. And in that context, Alpine already got rid of the OS and glib, leaving only the rest of the userland GPLish. OTOH busybox is GPL, too, and actually known for going after violators, so what do I know.