Also, I want to be clear that I'm using "simple" and "easy" in the rick hickey sense of the words, as in "simple" has more to do with what a thing is made of, and "easy" has more to do with ease of use, taking available tooling/familiarity and context into mind.

What I should have made clearer was that I think containers are both easier and simpler than VMs. There are both less moving parts (I haven't looked, but I assume less code), and containers are easier to get started with than VMs (set some flags on some syscalls versus make sure you buy the right CPU).