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Every time I see a "minimal image" announcement, I hope to see something in the <100MB range initial install, read-only root, and ssh-only (no GUI) -- something like OpenWRT, but with full power of debian repo behind it.

Instead, I see yet another graphical distro with graphical interfaces which most people won't ever need.

"with full power of debian repo behind it" isn't possible with a <100 MiB system, where already the kernel (with all modules) takes half of it, then + initramfs etc, and not to forget systemd (practically required for large parts of Debian packages). The compressed images are however only slightly >100 MiB usually, depending on whether a separate /boot FAT partition is used or not.

Another larger part of space is used for full WiFi support, related firmware especially. When creating or converting an own image, it is possible to skip WiFi, but for best compatibility with headless use cases, it is included in the provided downloads: https://dietpi.com/docs/hardware/#make-your-own-distribution

By default DietPi is no GUI (shell/console whiptail UI only) and SSH-only, but indeed not read-only. There are however ways to achieve it: https://dietpi.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?p=24920#p24920
Alpine Linux is probably more what you're looking for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux

It does not seem to be particularly suited for embedded devices, unless I am missing something?

- <100MB initial install - check

- read-only root -- in some cases? the diskless mode/lbu operation is neat, but it puts everything into RAM, and some boards may only have 1GB of it.

- ssh-only -- nope, have to connect keyboard/monitor to setup

- "full power of debian repo" -- nope

Alpine is great out for small images, but unfortunately still unusable for headless embedded devices out of the box.

You seem to know a lot about the specific requirements you are looking for. Have you considered rolling your own linux distro to meet your use case?

If there are enough other people that would be served by that setup, publishing the result could work very well for everyone with your niche needs.

There was a trend for a very short period of time for JEOS (Just Enough OS) releases. I loved these and always wondered why they suddenly died out. These days I use Alpine Linux which is as close as you can get...
https://www.armbian.com/bananapi/#kernels-archive-all

350~MB. Not the smallest but better.

It's still a ~1GB image and ~600MB installed.
I adore projects like this, yunohost also comes to mind, for (among other things) the amount of wisdom captured in many of the build/install scripts. If I am trying to install somethning and banging my head against a wall, almost always I should have checked how they did it an hour and a half ago.