Containers are substantially different to VMs, but in practice I see them as equivalent technologically and operationally for my home lab/self-hosting use cases (sans weaker security guarantees, but that I can live with).

They are a simplification in practice, because I can toss everything into a bunch of Pis that stay on 24/7 rather than worry about the power use (and the power bills) that would come with using a more fully-featured rack server/old PC that has enough RAM to deal with multiple VMs.