I can see this argument but at the same time Dockerfiles for my preferred framework (Phoenix) are more or less muscle memory for me at this point. The better question is: why don't frameworks come with a Dockerfile by default? The effort:reward ratio on containerization is huge, it gives you your app in a runnable, dependency-free format that you can build reliably and deploy on an extremely diverse set of platforms.

Dependency free? Isn’t Docker a dependency itself? And it’s the most annoying one — no other dependency constantly keeps a core going at 15% on my machine, or considers not upgrading a premium feature, or incessantly interrupts my work with NPS pop ups even when I’m doing nothing related to Docker.

If anyone at Docker is reading this, I mark “100% no” when you interrupt me with pop up asking if I’d recommend your product to a friend when I’m in the middle of working on something entirely unrelated to your product. I don’t know anyone who wouldn’t.

Docker Desktop is a development dependency, but you can also use Podman or minikube. I just use Podman these days, I prefer it. The container format is all standard these days, you don’t actually need anything Docker to use it. Fargate and Fly don’t even actually run the container directly, they convert it to a VM with Firecracker first.

Running containers make me feel like I need production hardware on my development machine. It's slow, clunky, and uses too much memory. I'd rather boot it up without docker.

There's no requirement to use Docker while developing, it's just useful when you need to deploy.