Obviously great article (for real) but it's sad that so many people still misunderstand containers and orchestration.
> I’m not smart enough to figure out docker confiuration [sic], so instead I compile my web application into a self contained statically linked binary executable file.
That might be fine for something that needs to run once. What if it crashes? And what about everything else that's required. Database, centralized cache, queues, workers, load balancers.
You can't build a fully functional product without those and what are you going to do Install all of the dependencies on a VM, by hand? What if you have to migrate to a different machine for whatever reason? Are you going to write scripts to automate all that and test them and change them and test them again? What if your program crashes? Are you installing supervisor? Will you turn your nice little binary into a daemon and deal with the whole initd/systemd configuration? What about the development environment? Are you going to do all that again when you switch laptop or when you hire someone?
(I personally prefer a PaaS like Heroku, Vercel or Render but that's besides the point)
Complexity very quickly gets out of control. What if you could, instead, define what your project requires in terms of environment, services, dependencies, networking etc. and just give it to a magical (today we'd say "AI powered") DevOps entity that makes sure everything runs smoothly no matter on what machine it's running, assuming it has enough resources? Locally you'd just run a single command and the whole thing would magically come to life.
That's what Docker and Compose/Kubernetes are. A very convenient abstraction layer that makes it very easy to define your underlying architecture in a declarative way and have something else worry about how to get there.
And, let's be honest, it's not even that complicated. You get 80% of the benefits with (less than) 20% of what Docker etc. are capable of. I learned how to use it once 8 years ago and I'm still using it to this day, just occasionally googling the odd command or Dockerfile keyword. I've seen the same with git. So many people just memorize a few commands and can't be bothered to learn how it conceptually works.
I guess I just went on a long rant here but I'm really surprised how, in a constantly evolving industry like tech, there are so many people who are afraid of learning something new or to change how they do things, sometimes out of pure irrational spite or fear of whatever is new. Reminds me of the bit from Brett Victor's talk "The future of programming" where (paraphrasing) he says "binary people thought assembly was a bad idea and assembly people thought C was a bad [...]" etc. etc.