Are minimal base images worth the trade-offs for debugging and costs?

I'm excited about the concept of using minimal or distroless base images to greatly reduce CVEs, but I'm also feeling pretty anxious about moving away from the familiar ubuntu:latest setup that just works. My main worry is that without shell access, package managers, or basic utilities, troubleshooting could turn into a nightmare. I get that multi-stage builds can help, but they still feel quite fragile to me.

Cost is another concern; those minimal images from vendors seem pricey, and I'm already having budget discussions. Plus, our devs are used to running docker exec to investigate containers, so this would disrupt our workflow. I see the security benefits, but it feels like I'm stuck between bloated, debuggable options and minimal, but opaque choices. Has anyone on here transitioned to minimal images on a large scale without completely disrupting their development process? And do the costs of vendor images really make sense, or would it be better to enhance security scanning on our existing images instead?