If you want that bare bones of a system I'd suggest using a minimal distribution. But honestly, I'm happy that I can wrap up servers and services into chroot jails with nspawn. Even when I'm not doing much, it makes it much easier to import, export, and limit capabilities

Simple example is I can have a duplicate of the "machine" running my server and spin it up (or have it already spun up) and take over if something goes wrong. Makes for a much more seamless experience.