More expressive? I think so too. Less convenient? I think so. Sadly history shows that convenience wins.

If you have to roll your own, you now own it. This should be a huge bar, and better isn’t enough.

This is the same flexibility trap as C++ build systems. Whereas in Cargo, adding a dependency is a single line.

Knowledge and practices that are pulled from the ecosystem compose, and can be ephemeral in ways that hand rolled solutions are not.

The thing with docker-compose.yml is that it is well known, well documented and relatively easy to learn and get running even for more complex configurations.

I would not want to go through that common shell script for every new project because it would probably look very different from project to project.