Jump start development with an up-to-date kernel and a solid OS with prebuilt packages. Maybe not suitable for production, but can be useful if you don’t like the images from your favourite hardware vendor. Or if you don’t have time to compile yocto layers or read Buildroot documentation. Or if you cannot run KVM virtual machines on your VPS to do this with ELBE.
Lot’s of ifs. But there is one thing you need: another Debian system running on the same architecture.
But at least it’s fast and you can use everything that comes with a popular distro.
Reading Buildroot documentation is a actually a pleasant activity.
To be continued.
The trick: debootstrap