> ephemeral, stateless nature of docker is a huge detriment in usability, and a chroot would be far more appropriate

But ephemeral changes (e.g. inside the running container) are the opposite of statelessness in the comment you are responding to?

And if you have required intricate custom changes in mounted host volumes (config, ...) that are not living alongside the compose file in the same repository, you can have "statefulness" that survives killing the containers.