moving away from official nginx or redis images - what are teams actually using in production

we kept the official nginx image around longer than we should have. familiar, well-documented, easy to justify. but every pipeline run was flagging the same base layer findings and nobody was fixing them because they weren't "our" CVEs.

the question we eventually had to answer was whether we needed a general-purpose image at all or just something that runs the binary cleanly. for most production services the answer is the latter: fewer packages, less to scan, less to defend. what have teams here landed on for common infrastructure components like nginx, redis, or postgres?