I’d even go as far as to say that the time/cost required to say learn the quirks of Docker and containers and layering builds is higher than what is needed to learn how to administer a website on a Debian server.
But that is irrelevant as Docker brings more to the table that a simple Debian server cannot by design. One could argue that lxd is sufficient for these, but that is even more hassle than Docker.
I just don't have the need to do a lot of work on the barebones server beyond basic ufw and getting Caddy and Docker running... Caddy will reverse-proxy all the apps running in containers. It really simplifies my setup.
Ah, also docker is managed with komo.do, but otherwise it is simple GUI over docker-compose
Aside: I really want to like NextCloud, but as much as I like aspects of it, I don't like plenty as well.
It's mostly to unify VLANs and simplify management (i.e everything is routed through my main router, rather than loose tunnels on servers/vm's)
And that's not even considering the "tied to a single corporation" problem. If us-east-1 wakes up tomorrow and decides to become gyliat-prime-1, we're all screwed because no more npm, no more docker, no more CloudFlare (because someone convinced everyone to deploy captchas etc).