Docker is a life saver if your shipping software on Linux. Otherwise you’re going to have to deal with endless bug reports from oddball distros. Docker lets you test with a stable set of dependencies and know that’s what your users will see.
It's undeniably useful and pragmatic, but its existence should be a source of shame, a constant reminder that we failed.
As a user/self-administrator, I really do not appreciate a developer throwing a ton of incidental complexity over the wall. Docker is basically a scaling up of the "works on my system" cop out.
I get that there are a lot of oddball distros, but it would seem that a policy of only digging into bug reports on specific well known distros would be more appropriate than basically forgoing the entire concept of a distribution in favor of what are essentially huge static binaries.
It's especially a problem when projects go nuts with this Dockerization anti-pattern, and become actively hostile to distributions shipping plainly administerable versions of their software (looking at you Home Assistant).
I'm sure Docker's great if you want to guarantee that the thing inside can't access the host system, using all kinds of kernel mechanisms, but that's generally the opposite of what you want for application software.
The main advantage of Docker for application distribution that I see is that it's lazy. You don't have to worry about keeping track of what's required, you don't have to fiddle with paths, you just hack until something works and then ship it. That's fine if you prioritize your time over your user's time.
As an example alpine has a smaller default stack size. It’s not obvious if that stack overflow is expected or not.