I don't understand any of these "bottle" solutions. All they're doing is running Wine. You can already run Wine without any of this.
It tends to work best when each app has its own isolated wine prefix. This lets you tweak wine settings/params as needed for each app.
This is how I do it for games using Lutris. I have a few games that work best on particular wine versions that won't be able to share the same prefix.
Nowadays, I tend to just run pretty much everything through Steam/Proton. I set `Proton-GE` as the default override for all my games, and then "install" things by adding them via the menu for third-party apps in the Steam UI. In the rare cases that I need to tweak something, I use `protontricks` to invoke `winetricks` on the prefix for the game, and things tend to just work after maybe installing 1-2 things at most.
But I still prefer a management tool on top like docker/podman/rancher.
Having used both manual wine prefixes and Bottles... I quite like Bottles and keep using it.
Your comment has serious "But dropbox is just rsync!" vibes. The ease of use is the point.
And at least Bottles does ease of use without losing too much control, unlike some of the very "game" specific tooling like heroic or lutris.
It is about convenience. For people willing to leave Windows but not their games, any hurdle taken down, no matter how small, is a win.
Wine bottles are not a software distribution method.
In that sense - it's actually incredibly similar to docker/snap. It's isolating the application with all the needed dependencies in it's own prefix, with a nice user experience on top.
It also distributes a large number of things: https://usebottles.com/database
A prefix is no more isolated than a folder and setting an env variable to control library lookup location.
This is in stark contrast to docker/snap which distribute actual software packages and use name spacing for isolation.
A prefix isolates a wine install. Bottles intentionally pushes users into a "one per application" strategy with Wine prefixes, isolating the wine install and deps for that application from other applications. Generally a great strategy for using Wine, even if you'd prefer to do it yourself.
And Bottles is a much more convenient wrapper compared to doing that manually and managing them yourself (which I've also done).
Bottles also distributes the instructions to configure a "generally working" prefix for a large number of desired applications.
If we go back to the docker analogy - they're giving you the Dockerfile, not the image. I'm not actually convinced that's such a "stark" contrast. If anything, it's semantic peanuts (and mostly for legal reasons given the popular applications tend to be copyright protected games, rather than OSS software which makes up most docker images).