I’m a retired Unix admin. It was my job from the early '90s until the mid '10s. I’ve kept somewhat current ever since by running various machines at home. So far I’ve managed to avoid using Docker at home even though I have a decent understanding of how it works - I stopped being a sysadmin in the mid '10s, I still worked for a technology company and did plenty of “interesting” reading and training.
It seems that more and more stuff that I want to run at home is being delivered as Docker-first and I have to really go out of my way to find a non-Docker install.
I’m thinking it’s no longer a fad and I should invest some time getting comfortable with it?
Some people seem to hate on it, but I love Docker, it works well for what it has to do and has relatively low overhead as far as I can tell. I personally virtualize a Debian server on Proxmox for my containers just so as to keep everything even more compartmentalized, but it takes more work than it’s worth to set up.
And if you don’t like Docker for whatever reason, you can also try Podman which is API compatible with Docker for the most part.