Given time limitations, I can imagine living with some applications like that for quite some time, their packaging sitting at the bottom of a long todo list. :)
Try also compute how hw requirement for whole infra plunge thanks to an immense overhead avoided on scale. The sole unhappy? Those who sell services, because for that they do need containers. This would push another evolution: built-in easy to tune isolation from a config, so they can sell instead of a VPS a system where you upload just your config, they import it, producing an isolated FHS for you, something we already have (i.e. FHSUserEnv) but with tunable system isolation. You would get your VPS, configured with just few SLoC instead of manually/in wrapped ways via SSH, and they can sell much more on the same iron, with much better performances as well.
All of the above is perfectly possible TODAY, it's only a matter of mass knowledge or lack thereof.
Well not by hand of course. virtualisation.oci-containers is pretty darn good. Podman+systemd provides some local sandboxing. Network-wide firewall prevents odd traffic from happening.
> No reproducibility etc
Images can be pinned to specific versions providing some reproducibility guarantees. Same goes for configs mounted as volumes.
There is also some software (libedgetpu using bazel as a prime example IME) with a complicated build process. Packaging it is a major PITA and the nixpkgs issue[1] is a graveyard of attempts to do so. I just build it using a container and push the binary version to the node with coral tpu.
For quick testing something, nothing to say, but for real, albeit personal homelab, usage...