"Everything in Docker is regular Linux" is a bit of a misleading statement IMO. You aren't required to pull an entire big distro like Ubuntu and install deps from a package manager. Are you familiar with scratch builds? You can create an image that is basically just a single executable binary with a few mounts handled for you behind the scenes so that chroot works.
Typically a minimal Alpine distro image will allow you to pull in deps however you want (either via package manager, manual download, or copy), run a build, and then copy only the artifact over to a scratch image for a final image that's only a few MB in size.
https://www.mgasch.com/post/scratch/
Typically a minimal Alpine distro image will allow you to pull in deps however you want (either via package manager, manual download, or copy), run a build, and then copy only the artifact over to a scratch image for a final image that's only a few MB in size.
https://medium.com/@chemidy/create-the-smallest-and-secured-...