Caveat: I am not a researcher (yet), I am moving from coding into science via a new degree, and along the way I am helping troubleshoot bioinformatics pipelines

Caveat: I am not a researcher (yet), I am moving from coding into science via a new degree, and along the way I am helping troubleshoot bioinformatics pipelines for scientists. I see a lot of reliance on containers to make code always available, and I have the same misgivings as you do. It'll work a few years into the future, but what happens once packages aren't compatible with each other/the base container is upgraded/etc. I've already seen this with older bioinformatics code, which is on old repositories that aren't running anymore, or are very unreliable (but weren't at the time that the code was written). And I'm talking about code that's "only" 15 years old; people will be going to these papers for implementation details long after that point. Zenodo seems like a good step in the right direction. It should be available as long as CERN is going, shouldn't it? And by that stage it should be "too big to fail".