So the goal is basically being able to do builds whilst running as few setup steps as possible.

Containers are a good common denominator because you essentially start with the OS, and then there's a file that automates installing further dependencies and building the artifact, which typically includes the important parts of the runtime environment.

  - They're stupidly popular, so it basically nullifies the setup steps.
  - Once setup, they by combinding both OS layers and App, they solve more of the problem and are therefore slightly more reliable.
  - They're self-documenting as long as you understand bash, docker, and don't do weird shit like build an undocumented intermediary layer.

Infrastructure as Code does the same thing for the underlying infra layers and kuberenetes is one of the nicer / quicker implementations of this, but requires you have kubernetes available.

Together they largely solve the "works on my PC" problem.