I would disagree with this even if I had a really nice cloud operator with great interfaces and utilities for logging, networking, monitoring, image management,

I would disagree with this even if I had a really nice cloud operator with great interfaces and utilities for logging, networking, monitoring, image management, volume management, secrets management, declarative infrastructure, etc and you can afford to run that many VMs... I'd still probably be running lots of cruft (SSH servers, process managers, etc) in each VM (or I'd have to go through the trouble of opting out) and I still need to get logs out of the VM and into the logging service, which usually implies faffing with ansible and friends. Nooooo thank you. Also, `docker commit` is pretty easy, and you can also just back up individual volumes.