It's not a hazing ritual, it's a necessary series of learning steps which equips you to be a good sysadmin of your new instance. Whatever did we do before Docker? The world must have sucked back then!
And it's not packed into a single opaque block: You can specify an image to derive your image from and Docker will overlay-mount your image on top of the base image, avoiding the need to store multiple copies of a base image.
Besides, none of this addresses the laundry list of reasons why running the distributions that package your stuff is unfeasible: a server administrator with a Synology NAS, an enterprise lackey with a limited environment, or one working with any of the containers-only enterprise distributions.
Guix System (another really cool FOSS thing) and sr.ht are beautiful projects from the outside but they are hampered by their inflexibility, adherence to dogma, and resistance to critique. I once wanted to play with Guix System's new `deploy` command on a DO droplet and nobody really wanted to consider that their newfangled command was entirely bungled. You can see this kind of treatment to potential contributors echoed in examples throughout this post's comments. It is endemic to FOSS communities. And it sucks.
Ideals are only realized in compromise. There is no example in history of anything else.