If there is a practical advantage, I think it's reducing the attack surface. I recently made an image that was a single statically-linked binary, some certs, and an /etc/passwd file all on top of a scratch base image. I did this because our organization's compliance team has only greenlighted Centos and scratch base images (no idea whether or not this is a particularly good policy) and I opted for scratch because it was marginally more effort for several small gains (reduced attack surface, faster deploys, faster builds, faster pulls, etc).