I know it's not common in research and makes often little sense there.

But at least in theory for deployments you should generate deployment images.

I.e. no pip included in the image(!), all dependencies preloaded, unnecessary parts stripped, etc.

Models likely might also be bundled, but not always.

Still large images, but also depending on what they are for the same image might be reused often so it can be cached by the provider to some degree.