I feel the same about your post. I have no idea how deploying a flat binary or Python tarball is better than a container image. The entire system is effectively

I feel the same about your post. I have no idea how deploying a flat binary or Python tarball is better than a container image. The entire system is effectively a dependency. Docker (or equivalent) lets me ship the entire system. Moreover I can take quite literally an image of that one system and deploy it to any number of machines identically, without any rebuilding. And I can host it interchangeably on any number of cloud providers with only small changes in configuration. The benefits go on and on. I would only ever bother with a "plain" deployment in the future if I had complete control over my deployment environment (+ the in-house expertise and time budget to manage it) and the performance overhead of the container was unacceptable.