There is the "full" version if "small" is not enough.

There is the "full" version if "small" is not enough.

Yes, I'm aware of that.

Do you think it would be better choice for the majority of the users of the ubuntu-small to include spatialite? Many dependencies that spatialite requires (proj, geos...) are already included so it might not be a big difference. The alpine-normal that includes Spatialite is 242 MB while ubuntu-small is 280 MB.

It seems that geopandas somehow depends on osgeo/gdal:ubuntu-small-latest. It may not be a sustainable decision because I think that the GDAL project does not promise that the docker builds will remain the same. I wonder if the geopandas project could modify the build recipes and make an own dockerfile that is optimal for the project. For example by removing the proj gridshift files from the ubuntu-full the file size would go down from 1.5 GB to maybe 900 MB.

Difficult to judge for me what the majority of users need, but because spatialite is already linked within gdal I supposed that adding this cannot have a large impact on the image size.
I don't know what the general scoping idea is in the "small" images, but I'd guess that the general principle is to include a reduced number of drivers, but that the drivers included are fully functional?
Anyway it is a pity that some functionalities on geopackages are available and some are not and you need to use kind of obscure tricks to get things working.

For the geopandas/pyogrio project it is not strictly necessary that this is added, as the CI builds run both on a conda based image, where the gdal installation does support spatialite within sqlite, and on the osgeo/gdal:ubuntu-small-latest image.

GeoPackage standard actually defines only 5 functions: ST_IsEmpty, ST_MinX, ST_MaxX, ST_MinY, and ST_MaxY but I agree that the functions coming from SpatiaLite are very usable extra.