Yes! We've actually created extremely small base images with Yocto for our own agent at resin.io, and it's a really cool approach, though it is very complex to set up and handle, and has approximately none of the elegance of a Dockerfile. Also, resinOS images are available as containers for some very specific use cases, so that's another instance where we've done something like that. Perhaps we should write up more about the approach.
Awesome, I would love to see hear more about the approach you guys used for building base images with Yocto. I'm willing to give up a little elegance for control and reproducibility.