Love Alpine Linux. Only thing stopping me from running it on my main workstation is that my Sublime Text is my main editor and they have no musl version.
Sublime is just one case. We had a Python service running in an Alpine container because it was thought as "mean and lean" by someone. Sound choice, right?
Guess what: we used a handful of (popular) Python modules that are backed by native libraries and PyPi didn't have musl-linked versions for them. The "mean and lean" Alpine-based image ended up weighing more than a debian-slim-based image.
IIRC npm will compile native extensions, sounds like PyPi (is that a package manager?) distributes binaries.