When I migrate to github.com/distribution/distribution/v3 from v2 in kubernetes kubernetes/kubernetes#107211, we got a surprising increase in transitive dependencies for this switch. See kubernetes/kubernetes#107211 (comment).

Firstly, we thought about maintaining the stable part in kubernetes utils repo. However, owners think it would be better if distribution/distribution spilt the library.

I may suggest to upstream distribution/distribution folks that splitting that library and doing symbol refs might be the right thing to do long term.

-	dockerref "github.com/docker/distribution/reference"
+	dockerref "github.com/distribution/distribution/v3/reference"

The only part we are using in Kubernetes project is like above.