During development you will need to login to the pod, to review settings, directory contents and so on. If the OS running in the pod does not allow you to do that - during development - then that's severely limiting.
Also you shouldn't really use pod OS to debug it. Kubernetes supports debug containers: you launch a separate container (presumably with convenient debug environment) and mounts selected container rootfs inside, so you can inspect it as needed. It also helps, when the target container does not work and you can't just exec into it.
There's a recommendation to remove everything from the container that's not necessary for running a given program, that reduces attack surface.