I was having a look at why the openjdk-25-runtime is so large compared to ubi-minimal, and while the OpenJDK presence explains a lot, I stumbled upon this, which looks odd:

/usr/lib64/python3.9                      30.9M

/usr/lib64/libpython3.9.so.1.0      3.7M

(that's the container-diff output)

(Note: this is with the UBI 9 image)

Indeed, we have a bunch of Python packages:

[default@408bd0f175b7 /]$ rpm -qa | grep python
python3-setuptools-wheel-53.0.0-15.el9.noarch
python3-pip-wheel-21.3.1-1.el9.noarch
python3-3.9.25-3.el9_7.x86_64
python3-libs-3.9.25-3.el9_7.x86_64

I wasn't able to find anything requiring Python in the container:

[default@408bd0f175b7 /]$ rpm -q --whatrequires python3
no package requires python3

But maybe there are some scripts requiring it that are not in RPM packages or for which RPM packages don't have a proper dependency to Python.

In any case, I would appreciate knowing the reason for it, if there is one.