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?
I was like you and avoided it for a long time. Dedicated use, lean VMs for each thing I was running. I decided to learn it, mostly out of curiosity and I’ll be honest, I like the convenience of it a lot. They’re easier to deploy and tend to have lower overhead than a single purpose VM running the same software.
Around the same time I switched my VM server over to Proxmox and learned about LxC containers. Those are also pretty nifty and a nice middle ground between full VM and docker container.
Currently I have a mixed environment because I like to use my homelab to learn, but most new stuff I deploy tends to go in this order: Docker > LxC > full VM.