Windows Server 2022 container base images?

Windows Containers _are_ usable without Docker. There's a pile of low-level command-line tools and libraries at https://github.com/microsoft/hcsshim/ that you can use, if you want to do all the state management and JSON writing/reading yourself. Those're what Docker uses currently. There's also https://github.com/containerd/containerd/ which can manage a lot of that for you (but not all, yet), and which Docker Engine will be hopefully be using for Windows in the next major release. Docker's been using containerd on Linux for years.

You can even (with some limitations) build container images without Docker, although currently none of the other currently-working solutions, e.g., BuildKit's cross-build support or Google ko, support executing natively on Windows, so you can't use `RUN` directives in your Dockerfile. Once we have BuildKit native support for Windows working, Docker should be moving to support that directly, as it does on Linux.

Docker is the glue that ties all this together, provides an API and CLI for it, keeps track of things like "Where are your container images on disk", downloads things off registries, etc. All the stuff that would be horrific if they were implemented in the OS directly, and tied to the OS update cycles. Some of those things did used to be implemented in the OS directly in Windows Server LTSC 2016, and it _was_ horrific, and we're still paying the cost of that until Windows Server LTSC 2016 ends support.

But my definition of "bloatware" might be different to yours.