It could just be that as a technology community we collectively are still currently getting our heads around what containerization is really essentially about. Maybe as most of us in the technology herd grok it at a deeper level, it will later become more obvious how tools prior to containerization can achieve the qualities we think we can only get from containers.

As a brain collective it may be before that we weren't conceptualizing our systems at an atomic enough level that containers introduced. Containers in service to our isolation mental models may be the true benefit of the trend. Even if the underlying technology dies or falls out of trend, the ideas will surely survive.

For my career I have learned to appreciate GNU/unix more by using containers.