I guess some people are just very used to it nowadays, hence it will work pretty well to them - same as how someone might have 10+ years of experience in Java a

I guess some people are just very used to it nowadays, hence it will work pretty well to them - same as how someone might have 10+ years of experience in Java and pick it for a project and use it successfully, whereas someone else could find the pace of development in it to be slower than the alternatives (despite how decent it is nowadays). Personally, I think that containers are a good choice for most webdev projects. If you are just starting out, then Docker Compose is probably very much sufficient for anything that touches upon a single node. Realistically, once you need to most past that, I feel like most folks would be served just fine by something like Docker Swarm + Portainer, you'd still need to run your own web server in front of your containers if you want something similar to an ingress, but in my eyes that's a plus, given how simple the config is (if you've ever installed Apache/Nginx/Caddy it's very much like that), or maybe go with Traefik if you must. There's scaling, resource reservations and limits, overlay networking between nodes, port mapping, storage, restart policies, configuration and pretty much most of the things you might reasonably need. Something like Hashicorp Nomad could also be mentioned here, but Docker Swarm seems like the simpler option to me. Past that, it's not like you can't run a bit cut down versions of Kubernetes, that will decrease its surface area somewhat - K0s, K3s and others all try to do this. I personally rather like K3s, it also integrates with Portainer/Rancher nicely if you need a dashboard, you can take advantage of Helm charts and all that other good stuff. I found the choice of K3s using Traefik by default (when I last used it) a bit suspect (configuring a custom non-ACME wildcard cert as the default for the ingress wasn't exactly well documented), but overall it was an okay experience and the resource usage wasn't anything crazy either. For my personal stuff nowadays, I still run a Docker Swarm cluster and I've no complaints there. It doesn't have autoscaling out of the box, but then again, my workloads are too boring to need that and I enjoy the predictability in billing I get.