I recently noticed the Debian Installer is happy to install on a plain block device without a partition table. All you need to do is to create the file system on a block device before proceeding to the partitioning phase in the installer. The installer falsely indicates there’s a partition there, but in reality this represents the file system on a block device.
This helps working with virtual machines as the resize operation no longer involves modifying the partition table. The 4.19 kernel, possibly some earlier kernels, too, can re-read the partition table without a reboot so the problem of having the partition table isn’t quite as bad as it used to be. Either way, it’s just easier without partitions.