You make an excellent point about Dockerfile's flexibility being its enduring strength. In my experience, this flexibility is especially valuable in microservices environments where different services might need vastly different runtime environments - from Java Spring apps to Node.js services to Python data processing scripts.

The "copy files and run commands" approach you mention is indeed similar to traditional ops workflows, which I think is why it has such staying power. It's conceptually simple and maps well to how developers already think about building and deploying applications.