&gt; the confused people who think the only thing that matters is &quot;developer productivity&quot;.<p>Developers, especially good developers (or hell, even just competent) are <i>more</i> than worth the effort put into improving their productivity, and the good ones will usually intuitively have a grasp of the XKCD time trade-off graph and reduce or eliminate delays themselves given the chance.<p>That being said, even in this day and age of extremely cheap cycles, non-volatile and volatile storage, and insane throughput, making something like VM&#x2F;chroot images smaller can lead to higher productivity in that you can spin them up faster, or spin up tons more in paralell than you would normally think of. Having the option to do such can help shape alternate modes of development and open up possibilities previously undreamt of (&quot;spin up 1000 docker images? Can&#x27;t do that because they each need 200MB RAM and I only have 32GB of RAM&quot;).