The good thing about ansible-builder 3 is that you can use arbitrary base images - as long as they use the right distro. (Earlier versions of ansible-builder required very specially crafted base images.)
I think it’s planned in principle to support other base images, but so far there are only ideas (Design principles for expanded distro support · Issue #553 · ansible/ansible-builder · GitHub, Pluggable abstraction of base image interactions and support scripts · Issue #637 · ansible/ansible-builder · GitHub), but no concrete plans / implementations. (I did have a PoC PR to make it work with other package managers, but that was just a hack and won’t get merged. And has quite a few conflicts now anyway.)
Having support for other distro images and package managers would make it a lot easier to create EEs you can fully trust. (Assuming you can fully trust all the packages and collections you are installing in them, of course 
)