As others say, where the use cases are so specific to each machine, it’ll be a headache juggling all of those images if your needs and workflow change down the road. But I’d be remiss to say I don’t practice a form of what you mention, I would go insane if I actually had to reinstall from distro defaults. I have a single perfected VM image with customizations and software common to all of my machines. And yes, if you were to go this route, there are little quirks to iron out manually each time I image to a new machine, even old and well-supported ones. Some just cosmetic, some preventing graphical output. It works well enough for me, but it also frankly leads to a poorly-documented system that will accumulate cruft with updates, so interested too to see what other people here suggest. Particularly for those niche customizations that land outside of /home and /etc (e.g. /usr/fonts, packages not provided by the distro).