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I don't have any Debian machine that doesn't end up with build-essential and dozens of header packages installed; it just comes up too often. Adding the header files directly to the packages saves time and frustration, and probably even saves space since a lot these packages are 50% overhead (dpkg meta files, db entries, etc.) by size.

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I don't install build-essential on a server, in a container, on a VM, etc. It really matters in those places. If you combine them then you lose the ability to deploy a small rootfs.

Servers, VMs etc. always end up getting build-essential to handle random python/ruby/npm/... package installations, as the shipped versions are hopelessly outdated and creating your own debian packages for all of them is about as enjoyable as performing appendix surgery on yourself.

Multi-stage builds do make it a bit easier to get rid of them for containers, yes, but during the build stage it's still required.

I refuse to believe that these meta files and database entries are occupying anywhere near a relevant amount of space.

Relatively.

Absolutely, it's negligible - because the space consumption of header files is also negligible. It's such a bizarre design choice to split out a single 30 line .h file into a separate package.

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