Yes, the Dockerfile has serious shortcomings and makes it totally miss the mark on what it was promising, but based on some comments about how nix is hard, it probably helped with adaptation.

Seems like it comes much easier to most people to issue series of (often nondeterministic) commands that mutate state rather than learning a new language that allows describing dependencies and have it figure out steps needed.

Yes obviously docker is primitive and people prefered that, just like they prefered php4/wordpress, it was the right match for a nascent space/market.

The issue to me is that it's mostly a regression and that when showed nix/guix people would squint saying it's horrible.. when in fact docker way is horrible, it's just nicer to them.

Alas, such is society.