[vlovich123]

Except when your Puppet/chef whatever aren’t set up carefully to be self-contained to be able to bring up the system to the correct state regardless of whatever interim state it might be in. It’s not impossible but it’s also not an out-of-the-box thing, it’s complicated to pull off, and usually requires constant expertise rather than being a playbook you hand off to whomever (even with expertise you can have bugs, you just aren’t in as big of a hole because you’ve ratholed on the assumption that you always have version 0 or version N-1 to get to state N).

Doing this is hard and there’s nothing in the ecosystem I’m aware of to guarantee that. Nix maybe? That’s part of the problem. The other is that docker has a conveniently large set of configs and things “out of the box” so there’s familiarity and documentation.

It’s not impossible to accomplish but building that community of doing things a sustainable way that actually addresses the pain points (rather than just dismissing it with “you’re just using the old tools incorrectly”) is what you need. If you’re going after docker your solution will have to support devs and devops. If you’re going for a niche community of enthusiasts/experts (probably more defensible and easier to grow), then focus just on a single niche use-case that general solutions could never outmatch (but don’t ignore growing it carefully if your niche solution is meaningfully better - listen to your users that you trust).