I've been playing with this stuff on and off for the past few weekends, getting an environment set up on my M1 air.
I ended up going with a VM, as it still allows (IIRC) the thin client to be thinner. There's definitely bits of containers I miss, like I'm back to keeping notes in a markdown file for commands that would be added to a Dockerfile, but I'm also not having to do weird things to get something like my shell history to persist.
Are containers a hack that will go away as VMs become lightweight or will containers replace VMs?
I run proxmox, and when I first set things up I used VMs, but over time I moved most server kinds of things to containers.
EDIT: docker is a special thing - creating an entire environment from one Dockerfile is pretty powerful.