Earlier quoted context omitted.
Check out SmartOS, it's illumos/solaris based but I think you'll find it is a nice middle ground. Not as abstracted, nice tooling that makes common tasks simple but not so opinionated you have to de-abstract things to get under the hood. Not painless but what is?
Sorry to say but that is bad advice. SmartOS is great and it was cool tech, but it is not Linux and it doesn't act like Linux is certain scenarios. My favourite example is OOM .. Linux will kill your docker container. SmartOS locks it up and makes it super hard to see understand why it failed. I like smartos but I have painful memories from about a decade ago. Incus however is what in use now in Linux.
If anything the correct behavior is indeed to NOT kill your container.