We see Alpine used in production less than most people think. People usually feel more comfortable writing a Dockerfile based on Debian or Ubuntu because those are what they're familiar with. In most cases it's worth the one-time cost of pulling the bigger base image, but it all depends on the use case.

Another common reason for large images is the Nvidia ecosystem. Most of the images that Nvidia publish can get close to 1GB. However, these should only need to be pulled to devices once until you need to upgrade the base image.