My thinking was that while the initial setup time might be comparable, i'm banking on saving time with long-term maintenance. Most regular linux distributions have so many moving parts that often also change from one major version to the next. One could argue a bespoke minimal installation based on alpine or something would alleviate that, but at the cost of much more setup time (for me, at least). But i'm not saying my way is particularly the best; it's just what works well enough for me.
Nah, all good :)
Sure, you could use debian (nice meme), but i have an irrational aversion to it, mostly rooted in its packaging system