[brian_cunnie]

> many uses of containers are ... statically linked binaries in a more complicated form

I have found that to be true in at least one case—I had built a custom DNS server in Go (statically linked), and originally planned to run it in a container, but on further reflection realized the container brought no added value, and it was much simpler to write a systemd service control script than to bring in the extra baggage of a container ecosystem to run the DNS server.

[ric2b]

That's a very basic example. Let's say your program also depends on ffmpeg to convert some images, psql to interact with a database and a few other non-library dependencies.

With containers you can trivially ensure those are always present and with the correct versions.

Plus containers do give you some security benefits when compared to running natively.