I dont believe that's an accurate assessment. If the grandparent wants to run a one off container with reproducible results, something like docker-compose is perfect. If he wants to run a multi-node microservices architecture then the story gets more complicated.
i run a lot of small projects with docker-compose on a single host and it makes deploying my changes very easy. Maybe there is a low cost setting it up, but i think eve with a small project it pays it divides pretty fast.
I could have been clearer. I meant that setting up docker for his use case i.e. a single 'standard' web application, is relatively easy. Especially if you're using something like Amazon Elastic Beanstalk. At least, that's been my experience.
You're right that docker can become very complex e.g. dockerizing and orchestrating mariadb with galera for high availability was not pleasant.
I agree that its actually ok for that use case. But then you don't have a big initial pain to solve, anyway - people using Docker in production usually have few other choices due to the scale they are operating at, and Nomad+Ansible doesn't cut it because there are complex dependencies.