I think Google's distroless container images are worth checking out as a quasi-alternative: https://github.com/GoogleContainerTools/distroless You use them as a base for a docker image and copy in your server code. These images are tailor made to strip out _everything_ that's not necessary to run the software--there's no shell for example. So you're still running a Linux kernel, libc, etc. but there's nothing there for an attacker to use other than your app code. You yourself can't even get into a shell to debug or examine what the state of your app is (which can actually be kind of aggravating in development).
I build my own distroless-like images for personal use using Fedora and RHEL, though I do follow the ubi-micro[0] build steps and include a tiny bit of user space components to enable debugging.
[0] https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/ubi9-micro/61...
Just run your program as the only process.
As a Linux host with no other software. No /bin/sh, nothing else in the filesystem.
Simple demo: https://github.com/tv42/alone