containers work fine for a lot of this. shuru is just what felt more natural to me. less config overhead and i wanted to learn by building it.
What would you say are a natural use case for Shuru or Lima vs say a full docker like environment? What does the sandbox allow you to do differently? There's additional overhead of the hypervisor. I'm mostly just trying to learn, as yourself.
installing new tools inside container requires you to update the Dockerfile and rebuild, here it seems you can simply run the installation command and create a checkpoint
You can do this with Docker too without Dockerfile or rebuilding. You can treat the container as mutable and just start/stop it, doing changes manually, and make snapshots with docker commit.
You'll forfeit the benefits of reproducible scripted environment of course but Docker does let you do it.